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LETTERS 



SOCIAL AIMS. 



KALPH WALDO EMERSOK 



/ 




/ 



BOSTON : 
JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY, 

Late Ticknor & Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co. 

1876. 



rsiuy 



4i 



l?7i 



Copyright, 1875. 
By RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 



University Press: Welch, Bigelow, & Co., 

Cambridge. 



CONTENTS. 

Page 

Poetry and Imagination 1 

Social Aims 69 

Eloquence ......... 97 

Resources ■ 119 

The Comic . 137 

Quotation and Originality 155 

Progress of Culture ...... 183 

Persian Poetry 211 

Inspiration 239 

Greatness 267 

Immortality ....,,,. 287 



POETRY AND IMAGINATION. 



POETRY AND IMxiGINATION. 

The perception of matter is made the common- 
sense, and for cause. This was the cradle, this 
the go-cart, of the hnman child. We must learn 
the homely laws of fire and water ; we must feed, 
wash, plant, build. These are ends of necessity, 
and first in the order of nature. Poverty, frost, 
famine, disease, debt, are the beadles and guardsmen 
that hold us to common-sense. The intellect, yielded 
up to itself, cannot supersede this tyrannic necessity. 
The restraining grace of common-sense is the mark 
of all the valid minds, — of ^sop, Aristotle, Alfred, 
Luther, Shakspeare, Cervantes, Franklin, E"apoleon. 
The common-sense which does not meddle with the 
absolute, but takes things at their word, — things 
as they appear, — believes in the existence of mat- 
ter, not because we can touch it, or conceive of it, 
but because it agrees with ourselves, and the uni- 
verse does not jest with us, but is in earnest, — is 
the house of health and life. In spite of all the 
joys of poets and the joys of saints, the most im- 
aginative and abstracted person never makes, with 
impunity, the least mistake in this particular, — 



4 POETRY AND IMAGINATION. 

never tries to kindle his oven with water, nor carries 
a torch into a powder-mill, nor seizes his wild charger 
by the tail. We should not pardon the blunder in 
another, nor endure it in ourselves. 

But whilst we deal with this as finality, early 
hints are given that we are not to stay here ; that 
we must be making ready to go ; — a warning that 
this magnificent hotel and conveniency we call 
Nature is not final. First innuendoes, then broad 
hints, then smart taps, are given, suggesting that 
nothing stands still in nature but death ; that the 
creation is on wheels, in transit, always passing into 
something else, streaming into something higher; 
that matter is not what it appears ; — that chemis- 
try can blow it all into gas. Faraday, the most exact I 
of natural philosophers, taught that when we should 
arrive at the monads, or primordial elements (the 
supposed little cubes or prisms of which aU matter 
was built up), we should not find cubes, or prisms, 
or atoms, at aU, but spherules of force. It was 
whispered that the globes of the universe were pre- 
cipitates of something more subtle ; nay, somewhat 
was murmured in our ear that dwindled astronomy 
into a toy ; — that too was no finality ; — only pro- 
visional, — a makeshift ; — that under chemistry 
was power and purpose : power and purpose ride 
on matter to the last atom. It was steeped in 
thought, — did everywhere express thought ; that, 
as great conq[uerors have burned their ships when 



INTRODUCTORY. 5 

once they were landed on the wished-for shore, so 
the noble house of Nature we inhabit has tempo- 
rary uses, and we can afford to leave it one day. 
The ends of all are moral, and therefore the begin- 
nings are such. Thin or solid, everything is in 
flight. I believe this conviction makes the charm 
of chemistry, — that we have the same avoirdu- 
pois matter in an alembic, without a vestige of the 
old form ; and in animal transformation not less, as 
in grub and fly, in egg and bird, in embryo and man ; 
everything undressing and stealing away from its 
old into new form, and nothing fast but those in- 
visible cords which we call laws, on which all is 
strung. Then we see that things wear different 
names and faces, but belong to one family; that 
the secret cords, or laws, show their well-known 
virtue through every variety, — be it animal, or 
plant, or planet, — and the interest is gradually 
transferred from the forms to the lurking method. 
This hint, however conveyed, upsets our politics, 
trade, customs, marriages, nay, the common-sense 
side of religion and literature, which are all founded 
on low nature, — on the clearest and most economi- 
cal mode of administering the material world, con- 
sidered as final. The admission, never so covertly, 
that this is a makeshift, sets the dullest brain in 
ferment ; — our little sir, from his first tottering 
steps, — as soon as he can crow, — does not like 
to be practised upon, suspects that some one is 



6 POETEY AND IMAGINATION. 

"doing" him, — and, at this alarm, everything is 
compromised ; — gunpowder is laid under every 
man's breakfast-table. 

But whilst the man is startled by this closer in- 
spection of the laws of matter, his attention is 
called to the independent action of the mind, — its 
strange suggestions and laws, — a certain tyranny 
which springs up in his own thoughts, which have 
an order, method, and beliefs of their own, very 
different from the order which this common-sense 
uses. 

Suppose there were in the ocean certain strong 
currents which drove a ship, caught in them, with 
a force that no skill of saihng with the best wind, 
and no strength of oars, or sails, or steam, could 
make any head against, any more than against 
the current of Niagara : such currents — so tyran- 
nical — exist in thoughts, those finest and sub- 
tilest of all waters, — that, as soon as once thought 
begins, it refuses to remember whose brain it be- 
longs to, — what country, tradition, or religion, — 
and goes whirling off — swim we merrily — in a 
direction self-chosen, by law of thought, and not by 
law of kitchen clock or county committee. It has 
its own polarity. One of these vortices or self- 
directions of thought is the impulse to search re- 
semblance, afi&nity, identity, in all its objects, and 
hence our science, from its rudest to its most refined 
theories. 



INTRODUCTORY. 7 

The electric word pronounced by John Hunter a 
hundred years ago, — arrested and progressive de- 
velopment, — indicating the way upward from the 
invisible protoplasm to the highest organisms, — 
gave the poetic key to I^atural Science, — of which 
the theories of Geoffrey St. Hilaire, of Oken, of 
Goethe, of Agassiz, and Owen, and Darwin, in 
zoology and botany, are the fruits, — a hint whose 
power is not yet exhausted, showing unity and per- 
fect order in physics. 

The hardest chemist, the severest analyzer, scorn- 
ful of all but dryest fact, is forced to keep the 
poetic curve of nature, and his result is like a 
myth of Theocritus. All multiplicity rushes to be 
resolved into unity. Anatomy, osteology, exhibit 
arrested or progressive ascent in each kind; the 
lower pointing to the higher forms, the higher to 
the highest, from the fluid in an elastic sack, from 
radiate, moUusk, articulate, vertebrate, — up to 
man ; as if the whole animal world were only a 
Hunterian museum to exhibit the genesis of man- 
kind. 

Identity of law, perfect order in physics, perfect 
parallelism between the laws of Nature and the 
laws of thought exist. In botany we have the like, 
the poetic perception of metamorphosis, — that the 
same vegetable point or eye which is the unit of 
the plant can be transformed at pleasure into every 
part, as bract, leaf, petal, stamen, pistil, or seed. 



8 POETRY AND IMAGINATION. 

In geology, what a useful hint was given to the 
early inquirers on seeing in the possession of Pro- 
fessor Playfair a bough of a fossil tree which was 
perfect wood at one end, and perfect mineral coal 
at the other. Natural objects, if individually de- 
scribed, and out of connection, are not ■ yet known, 
since they are really parts of a symmetrical uni- 
verse, like words of a sentence; and if their true 
order is found, the poet can read their divine sig- 
nificance orderly as in a Bible. Each animal or 
vegetable form remembers the next inferior, and 
predicts the next higher. 

There is one animal, one plant, one matter, and 
one force. The laws of light and of heat trans- 
late each other ; — so do the laws of sound and of 
color ; and so galvanism, electricity, and magnetism 
are varied forms of the selfsame energy. While 
the student ponders this immense unity, he observes 
that all. things in nature, the animals, the mountain, 
the river, the seasons, wood, iron, stone, vapor, — 
have a mysterious relation to his thoughts and his 
life ; their growths, decays, quality, and use so curi- 
ously resemble himself, in parts and in wholes, 
that he is compelled to speak by means of them. 
His words and his thoughts are framed by their 
help. Every noun is an image. Nature gives him, 
sometimes in a flattered likeness, sometimes in cari- 
cature, a copy of every humor and shade in his 
character and mind. The world is an immense 



INTRODUCTORY. y 

picture-book of every passage in human life. Every 
object he beholds is the mask of a man. 

" The privates of man's heart 
They speken and sound in his ear 
As tho' they loud winds were " ; 

for the universe is full of their echoes^ 

Every correspondence we observe in mind and 
matter suggests a substance older and deeper than 
either of these old nobilities. We see the law 
gleaming through, like the sense of a half-translated 
ode of Hafiz. The poet who plays with it with 
most boldness best justifies himself, — is most pro- 
found and most devout. Passion adds eyes, — is 
a magnifying-glass. Sonnets of lovers are mad 
enough, but are valuable to the philosopher, as are 
prayers of saints, for their potent S3niibolism. 

Science was false by being unpoetical. It as- 
sumed to explain a reptile or moUusk, and isolated 
it, — which is hunting for life in graveyards. Eep- 
tile or moUusk or man or angel only exists in sys- 
tem, in relation. The metaphysician, the poet, only 
sees each animal form as an inevitable step in the 
path of the creating mind. The Indian, the hunter, 
the boy with his pets, have sweeter knowledge of 
these than the savant. We use semblances of logic 
until experience puts us in possession of real logic. 
The poet knows the missing link by the joy it 
gives. The poet gives us the eminent experiences 
only, — a god stepping from peak to peak, nor 
planting his foot but on a mountain. 



10 POETRY AND IMAGINATION. 

Science does not know its debt to imagination. 
Goethe did not believe that a great' naturalist could 
exist without this faculty. He was himself con- 
scious of its help, which made him a prophet 
among the doctors. From this vision he gave 
brave hints to the zoologist, the botanist, and the 
optician. 

Poetry. — The primary use of a fact is low : the 
secondary use, as it is a figure or illustration of my 
thought, is the real worth. First, the fact ; second, 
its impression, or what I think of it. Hence Nature 
was called "a kind of adulterated reason." Seas, 
forests, metals, diamonds, and fossils interest the eye, 
but 't is only with some preparatory or predicting 
charm. Their value to the intellect appears only 
when I hear their meaning made plain in the 
spiritual truth they cover. The mind, penetrated 
with its sentiment or its thought, projects it out- 
ward on whatever it beholds. The lover sees re- 
minders of his mistress in every beautiful object ; 
the saint, an argument for devotion in every nat- 
ural process; and the facility with which I^ature 
lends itself to the thoughts of man, the aptness 
^with which a river, a flower, a bird, fire, day, or 
night, can express his fortunes, is as if the world 
were only a disguised man, and, with a change 
of form, rendered to him all his experience. We 
cannot utter a sentence in sprightly conversation 



POETRY. 11 

without a similitude. ISTote our incessant use of 
the word like, — like fire, like a rock, like thunder, 
like a bee, "like a year without a spring." Con- 
versation is not permitted without tropes ; ' nothing 
but great weight in things can afford a quite literal 
speech. It is ever enlivened by inversion and trope. 
God himself does not speak prose, but communi- 
cates? with us by hints, omens, inference, and dark 
resemblances in objects lying aU around us. 

Nothing so marks a man as imaginative expres- 
sions. A figurative statement arrests attention, and 
is remembered and repeated. How often has a 
phrase of this kind made a reputation. Pythago- 
ras's Golden Sayings were such, and Socrates's, and 
Mirabeau's, and Burke's, and Bonaparte's. Genius 
thus makes the transfer from one part of [N'ature 
to a remote part, and betrays the rhymes and 
echoes that pole makes with pole. Imaginative 
minds cling to their images, and do not wish them 
rashly rendered into prose reality, as children re- 
sent your showing them that their doll Cinderella 
is nothing but pine wood and rags : and my young 
scholar does not wish to know what the leopard, 
the wolf, or Lucia, signify in Dante's Inferno, but 
prefers to keep their veils on. Mark the delight 
of an audience in an image. When some familiar 
truth or fact appears in a new dress, mounted as 
on a fine horse, equipped with a grand pair of 
ballooning wings, we cannot enough testify our 



12 POETRY AND IMAGINATION. 

surprise and pleasure. It is like the new virtue 
shown in some unprized old property, as when a 
boy finds that his pocket-knife will attract steel 
filings and take up a needte ; or when the old horse- 
block in the yard is found to be a Torso Hercules 
of the Phidian age. Vivacity of expression may 
indicate this high gift, even when the thought is 
of no great scope, as when Michel Angelo, praising 
the terra cottas, said, " If this earth were to become 
marble, woe to the antiques ! " A happy symbol 
is a sort of evidence that your thought is just. 
I had rather have a good symbol of my thought, or 
a good analogy, than the suffrage of Kant or Plato. 
If you agree with me, or if Locke or Montesquieu 
agree, I may yet be wrong; but if the elm-tree 
thinks the same thing, if running water, if burning 
coal, if crystals, if alkaKes, in their several fashions, 
say what I say, it must be true. Thus, a good sym- 
bol is the best argument,' and is a missionary to 
persuade thousands. The Vedas, the Edda, the 
Koran, are each remembered by their happiest 
figure. There is no more welcome gift to men 
than a new symbol. That satiates, transports, 
converts them. They assimilate themselves to it, - — 
deal with it in all ways, and it will last a hundred 
years. Then comes a new genius, and brings an- 
other. Thus the Greek mythology called the sea 
"the tear of Saturn.". The return of the soul to 
God was described as " a flask of water broken in 



POETRY. 13 

the sea." Saint John gave us the Christian figure 
of " souls washed in the blood of Christ." The aged 
Michel Angelo indicates his perpetual study as in 
boyhood, — "I carry my satchel still." Machiavel 
described the papacy as ''a stone inserted in the 
body of Italy to keep the wound open." To the 
Parliament debating how to tax America, Burke 
exclaimed, " Shear the woL&". Our Kentuckian 
orator said of his dissent from his companion, " I 
showed him the back of my hand." And our 
proverb of the courteous soldier reads : "An iron 
hand in a velvet glove." 

This belief that the higher use of the material 
world is to furnish us types or pictures to express 
the thoughts ' of the mind is carried to its logical 
extreme by the Hindoos, who, following Buddha, 
have made it the central doctrine of their religion, 
that what we call I^ature, the external world, has 
no real existence, -^ is only phenomenal. Youth, 
age, property, condition, events, persons, — self, even, 
— are successive maias (deceptions) through which 
Vishnu mocks and instructs the soul. I think 
Hindoo books the best gymnastics for the mind, as 
showing treatment. All European libraries might 
almost be read without the swing of this gigantic 
arm being suspected. But these Orientals deal 
with worlds and pebbles freely. 

For the value of a trope is that the hearer is 
one ; and indeed Kature itself is a vast trope, and 



14 POETRY AND IMAGINATION. 

all particular natures are tropes. As the bird 
alights on the bough, — then plunges into the air 
again, so the thoughts of God pause but for a mo- 
ment in any form." All thinking is analogizing, and 
't is the use of life to learn metonomy. The endless 
passing of one element into new forms, the inces- 
sant metamorphosis, explains the rank which the 
imagination holds in our catalogue of mental pow- 
ers. The imagination is the reader of these forms. 
The poet accounts all productions and changes of 
Nature as the nouns of language, uses them repre- 
sentatively, too well pleased with their ulterior to 
value much their primary meaning. Every new 
object so seen gives a shock of agreeable surprise. 
The impressions on the imagination make the great 
days of life : the book, the landscape, or the per- 
sonality which did not stay on the surface of the 
eye or ear, but penetrated to the inward sense, agi- 
tates us, and is not forgotten. Walking, working, 
or talking, the sole question is how many strokes 
vibrate on this mystic string, — how many diame- 
ters are drawn quite through from matter to spirit ; 
for, whenever you enunciate a natural law, you dis- 
cover that you have enunciated a law of the mind. 
Chemistry, geology, hydraulics, are secondary sci- 
ence. The atomic theory is only an interior pro- 
cess produced^ as geometers say, or the effect of a 
foregone metaphysical theory. Swedenborg saw 
gravity to be only an external of the irresistible 



POETRY. 15 

attractions of affection and faith. Mountains and 
oceans we think we understand : — yes, so long as 
they are contented to be such, and are safe with the 
geologist, — but when they are melted in Prome- 
thean alembics, and come out men, and then, melted 
again, come out words, without any abatement, but 
with an exaltation of power ! — 

In poetry we say we require the miracle. The 
bee flies among the flowers, and gets mint and mar- 
joram, and generates a new product, which is not 
mint and marjoram, but honey ; the chemist mixes 
hydrogen and oxygen to yield a new product, which 
is not these, but water ; and the poet listens to con- 
versation, and beholds all objects in nature, to give 
back, not them, but a new and transcendent whole. 

Poetry is the perpetual endeavor to express the 
spirit of the thing, to pass the brute body, and 
search the life and reason which causes it to exist ; 
— to see that the object is always flowing away, 
whilst the spirit or necessity which causes it sub- 
sists. Its essential mark is that it betrays in every 
word instant activity of mind, shown in new uses 
of every fact and image, — in preternatural quick- 
ness or perception of relations. All its words are 
poems. It is a presence of mind that gives a 
miraculous coinmand of all means of uttering the 
thought and feeling of the moment. The poet 
squanders on the hour an amount of life that would 
more than furnish the seventy years of the man 
that stands next him. 



16 POETRY AND IMAGINATION. 

The term genius, when used with emphasis, im- 
plies imagination ; use of symbols, figurative speech. 
A deep insight will always, like Nature, ultimate 
its thought in a thing. As soon as a man masters a 
principle, and sees his facts in relation to it, fields, 
waters, skies, offer to clothe his thoughts in images. 
Then all men understand him : Parthian, Mede, Chi- 
nese, Spaniard, and Indian hear their own tongue. 
For he can now find symbols of universal signifi- 
cance, which are readily rendered into any dialect ; 
as a painter, a sculptor, a musician, can in their 
several ways express the same sentiment of anger, 
or love, or religion. 

The thoughts are few; the forms many; the 
large vocabulary or many-colored coat of the in- 
digent unity. The savans are chatty and vain, — 
but hold them hard to principle and definition, 
and they become mute and near-sighted. What is 
motion ? what is beauty ? what is matter ? what is 
life ? what is force ? Push them hard, and they 
will not be loquacious. They will come to Plato, 
Proclus, and Swedenborg. The invisible and im- 
ponderable is the sole fact. " Why changes not the 
violet earth into musk ? " What is the term of the 
ever-flowing metamorphosis ? ' I do not know what 
are the stoppages, but I see that a devouring unity 
changes all into that which changes not. 

The act of imagination is ever attended by pure 
delight. It infuses a certain volatility and intoxi- 



IMAGINATION. 17 

cation into all nature. It has a flute whicii sets 
the atoms of our frame in a dance. Our indeter- 
minate size is a delicious secret which it reveals to 
us. The mountains begin to dislimn, and float in 
the air. In the presence and conversation of a true 
poet, teeming with images to express his enlarging 
thought, his person, his form, grows -larger to our 
fascinated eyes. And thus begins that deification 
which all nations have made of their heroes in 
every kind, — saints, poets, lawgivers, and warriors. 

Imagination. — Whilst common-sense looks at 
things or visible nature as real and final facts, 
poetry, or the imagination which dictates it, is a 
second sight, looking through these, and using 
them as types or words for thoughts which they 
signify. Or is this belief a metaphysical whim 
of modern times, and quite too refined ? On the 
contrary, it is as old as the human mind. Our 
best definition of poetry is one of the oldest sen- 
tences, and claims to come down to us from the 
Chaldaean Zoroaster, who wrote it thus : " Poets 
are standing transporters, whose employment con- 
sists in speaking to the Father and to matter; 
in. producing apparent imitations of unajjparent 
natures, and inscribing things unapparent in the 
apparent fabrication of the world " ; in other 
words, the world exists for thought : it is to make 
appear things which hide : mountains, crystals. 



18 POETRY AND IMAGINATION. 

plants, animals, are seen ; that which makes them 
is not seen : these, then, are " apparent copies of 
unapparent natures." Bacon expressed the same 
sense in his definition, "Poetry accommodates the 
shows of things to the desires of the mind"; and 
Swedenborg, when he said, " There is nothing exist- 
ing in human thought, even though relating to the 
most mysterious tenet of faith, but has combined 
with it a natural and sensuous image." And again : 
" Names, countries, nations, and the like are not at 
all known to those who are in heaven ; they have 
no idea of such things, but of the realities signified 
thereby." A symbol always stimulates the intel- 
lect ; therefore is poetry ever the best reading. The 
very design of imagination is to domesticate us in 
another, in a celestial, nature. 

This power is in the image because this power is 
in nature. It so affects, because it so is. All that 
is wondrous in Swedenborg is not his' invention, 
but his extraordinary perception-; — that he was 
necessitated so to see. The world realizes the 
mind. Better than images is seen through them. 
The selection of the image is no more arbitrary 
than the power and significance of the image. The 
selection must follow fate. Poetry, if perfected, is 
the .only verity; is the speech of man after the 
real, and not after the apparent. 

Or, shall we say that the imagination exists by 
sharing the ethereal currents ? The poet contem- 



IMAGINATION. 19 

plates the central identity, sees it undulate and 
roll this way and that, with divine flowings, through 
remotest things ; and, following it, can detect essen- 
tial resemblances in natures never before compared. 
He can class them so audaciously, because he is 
sensible of the sweep of the celestial stream, from 
which nothing is exempt. His own body is a flee- 
ing apparition, — his personality as fugitive as the 
trope he employs. In certain hours we can almost 
pass our hand through our own body. I think the 
use or value of poetry to be the suggestion it affords 
of the flux or fugaciousness of the poet. The mind 
delights in measuring itself thus with matter, with 
history, and flouting both. A thought, any thought, 
pressed, followed, opened, dwarfs matter, custom, 
and all but itself But this second sight does not 
necessarily impair the primary or common sense. 
Pindar and Dante, yes, and the gray and timeworn 
sentences of Zoroaster, may all be parsed, though 
we do not parse them. The poet has a logic, though 
it be subtile. He observes higher laws than he 
transgresses. " Poetry must first be good sense, 
though it is something better." 

This union of first and second sight reads nature 
to the end of delight and of moral use. Men are 
imaginative, but not overpowered by it to the ex- 
tent of confounding its suggestions with external 
facts. We live in both spheres, and must not 
mix them. Genius certifies its entire possession 



20 POETRY AND IMAGINATION. 

of its thought, by translating it into a fact which 
perfectly represents it, and is hereby "education. 
Charles James Fox thought " Poetry the great re- 
freshment of the human mind, — the only thing, 
after all ; that men first found out they had minds, 
by making and tasting poetry." 

Man runs about restless and in pain when his 
condition or the objects about him do not fully 
match his thought. He wishes to be rich, to be 
old, to be young, that things may obey him. In 
the ocean, in fire, in the sky, in the forest, he 
finds facts adequate and as large as he. As his 
thoughts are deeper than he ca.n fathom, so also 
are these. 'T is easier to read Sanscrit, to decipher 
the arrowhead character, than to interpret these 
familiar sights. 'T is even much to name them. 
Thus Thomson's " Seasons " and the best parts' of 
many old and many new poets are simply enu- 
merations by a person who felt the beauty of 
the common sights and sounds, without any at- 
tempt to draw a moral or affix a meaning. 

The poet discovers that what men value as sub- 
stances have a higher value as symbols ; that Na- 
ture is the immense shadow of man. A man's 
action is only a picture-book of his creed. He 
does after what he believes. Your condition, your 
employment, is the fable of you. The world is 
thoroughly anthropomorphized, as if it had passed 
through the body and mind of man, and taken his 



IMAGINATION. 21 

mould and form. Indeed, good poetry is always 
personification, and heightens every species of force 
in nature by giving it a human volition. We are 
advertised that there is nothing to which he is 
not related; that everything is convertible into 
every other. The staff in "this hand is the radius 
mctor of the sun. The chemistry of this is the 
chemistry of that. Whatever one act we do, what- 
ever one thing we learn, we are doing and learn- 
ing all things, — marching in the direction of 
imiversal power. Every healthy nund is a true 
Alexander or Sesostris, building a universal mon- 
archy. 

The senses imprison us, and we help them with 
metres as limitary, — with a pair of scales and a 
foot-rule, and a clock. How long it took to find 
out what a day was, or what this sun, that, makes 
days ! It cost thousands of years only to make the 
motion of the earth suspected. Slowly, by compar- 
ing thousands of observations, there dawned on 
some mind a theory of the sun, — and we found 
the astronomical fact. But the astronomy is in the 
mind : the senses affirm that the earth stands still 
and the sun moves. The senses collect the surface 
facts of matter. The intellect acts on these brute 
reports, and obtains from them results which are 
the essence or intellectual form of- the experiences. 
It compares, distributes, generalizes, and uplifts 
them into its own sphere. It know^s that these 



22 POETRY AND IMAGINATION. 

transfigured results are not the brute experiences, 
just as souls in heaven are not the red bodies they 
once animated. Many transfigurations have be- 
fallen them. The atoms of the body were once 
nebulae, then rock, then loam, then corn, then 
chyme, then chyle, then blood ; and now the be- 
holding and co-energizing mind sees the same refin- 
ing and ascent to the third, the seventh, ^or the tenth 
power of the daily accidents which the senses re- 
port, and which make the raw material of knowl- 
edge. It was sensation ; when memory came, it 
was experience ; when mind acted, it was knowl- 
edge ; when mind acted on it as knowledge, it was 
thought. 

This metonomy, or seeing the same sense in 
things so diverse, gives a pure pleasure. Every one 
of a million times we find a charm in the meta- 
morphosis. It makes us dance and sing. All men 
are so far poets. When people tell me they do not 
relish poetry, and bring me SheUey, or Aikin's 
Poets, or I know not what volumes of rhymed 
English, to show that it has no charm, I am quite 
of their mind. But this dislike of the books only 
proves their liking of poetry. For they relish 
^sop, — cannot forget him, or not use him ; bring 
them Homer's Iliad, and they like that; or the 
Cid, and that rings well : read to them from Chau- 
cer, and they reckon him an honest fellow. " Lear " 
and "Macbeth" and "Eichard III." they know 



IMAGINATION. 23 

pretty well without guide. Give them Eohin 
Hood's ballads, or " Griselda," or " Sir Andrew Bar- 
ton/' or " Sir Patrick Spense," or " Chevy Chase," 
or " Tarn O'Shanter," and they like these well 
enough. They like to see statues ; they like to 
name the stars ; they like to talk and hear of Jove, 
Apollo, Minerva, Venus, and the Mne. See how 
tenacious we are of the old names. They like 
poetry without knowing it as such. They like to 
go to the theatre and be made to weep ; to Faneuil 
Hall, and be taught by Otis, Webster, or Kossuth, 
or Phillips, what great hearts they have, what tears, 
what new possible enlargements to their narrow 
horizons. They like to see sunsets on the hills or 
on a lake shore. Now, a cow does not gaze at the 
rainbow, or show or affect any interest in the land- 
scape, or a peacock, or the song of thrushes. 

N"ature is the true idealist. When she serves us 
best, when, on rare days, she speaks to the imagina- 
tion, we feel that the huge heaven and earth are but 
a web drawn around us, that the light, skies, and 
mountains are but the painted vicissitudes of the 
soul. Who has heard our hymn in the churches 
without accepting the truth, — 

"As o'er our heads the seasons roll, 
And soothe with change of bliss the soul " ? 

Of course, when we describe man as poet, and 
credit him with the triumphs of the art, we speak 
■of the potential or ideal man, — not found now in 



24 POETRY AND IMAGINATION. 

any one person. You must go through a city or 
a nation, and find one faculty here, one there, to 
build the true poet withal. Yet all men know the 
portrait when it is drawn, and it is part of religion 
to believe its possible incarnation. 

He is the healthy, the wise, the fundamental, the 
manly man, seer of the secret ; against all the ap- 
pearance, he sees and reports the truth, namely, 
that the soul generates matter. And poetry is 
the only verity, — the expression of a sound mind 
speaking after the ideal, and not after the apparent. 
As a power, it is the perception of the symbolic 
character of things, and the treating them as rep- 
resentative : as a talent, it is a magnetic tena- 
ciousness of an image, and by the treatment 
demonstrating that this pigment of thought is as 
palpable and objective to the poet as is the ground 
on which he stands, or the walls of houses about 
him. And this power appears in Dante and Shak- 
speare. In some individuals this insight, or second 
sight, has an extraordinary reach which compels 
our wonder, as in Behmen, Swedenborg, and William 
Blake, the painter. 

William Blake, whose abnormal genius, Words- 
worth said, interested him more than the conver- 
sation of Scott or of Byron, writes thus : " He who 
does not imagine in stronger and better linea- 
ments, and in stronger and better light than his 
perishing mortal eye can see, does not imagine 



IMAGINATION. V 25 

at all. The painter of this work asserts that all 
his imaginations appear to him infinitely more per- 
fect and more minutely organized, than anything 

seen by his mortal eye I assert for myself 

that I do not behold the outward creation, and that 
to me it would be a hindrance, and not action. I 
question not my corporeal eye any more than 
I would question a window concerning a sight. I 
look through it, and not with it." 

'T is a problem of metaphysics to define the 
province of Fancy and Imagination. The words 
are often used, and the things confounded. Im- 
agination respects the cause. It is the vision of an 
inspired soul reading arguments and affirmations in 
all nature of that which it is driven to say. But 
as soon as this soul is released a little from its 
passion, and at leisure plays with the resemblances 
and types for amusement, and not for its moral 
end, we call its action Fancy. Lear, mad with his 
affliction, thinks every man who suffers must have 
the like cause with his own. "What, have his 
daughters brought him to this pass ? " But when, 
his attention being diverted, his mind rests from 
this thought, he becomes fanciful with Tom, play- 
ing with the superficial resemblances of objects; 
Bunyan, in pain for his soul, wrote " Pilgrim's 
Progress"; Quarles, after he was quite cool, wrote 
" Emblems." 



26 POETRY AND IMAGINATION. 

Imagination is central ; fancy, superficial. Fancy 
relates to surface, in which a great part of life lies. 
The lover is rightly said to fancy the hair, eyes, 
complexion of the maid. Fancy is a wilful, im- 
agination a spontaneous act ; fancy, a play as with 
dolls and puppets which we choose to call men and 
women ; imagination, a perception and affirming 
of a real relation between a thought and some ma- 
terial fact. Fancy amuses ; imagination expands 
and exalts us. Imagination uses an organic classi- 
fication. Fancy joins by accidental resemblance, 
surprises and amuses the idle, but is silent in the 
presence of great passion and action. Fancy aggre- 
gates ; imagination animates. Fancy is related to 
color ; imagination, to form. Fancy paints ; imagi- 
nation sculptures. 

Veracity. — I do not wish, therefore, to find that 
my poet is not partaker of the feast he spreads, or 
that he would kindle or amuse me with that which 
does not kindle or amuse him. He must believe in 
his poetry. Homer, Milton, Hafiz, Herbert, Sweden- 
borg, "Wordsworth, are heartily enamored of their 
sweet thoughts. Moreover, they know that this 
correspondence of things to thoughts is far deeper 
than they can penetrate, — defying adequate expres- 
sion ; that it is elemental, or in the core of things. 
Veracity, therefore, is that which we require in poets, 
— that they shall say how it was with them, and 



VERACITY. 27 

not what might he said. And the fault of our 
popular poetry is that it is not sincere. 

" What news ? " asks man of man everywhere. 
The only teller of news is the poet. When he 
sings, the world listens with the assurance that 
now a secret of God is to be spoken. The right 
poetic mood is or makes a more complete sensi- 
bihty, — piercing the outward fact to the meaning 
of the fact ; shows a sharper insight : and the per- 
ception creates the strong expression of it, as the 
man who sees his way walks in it. 

T is a rule in eloquence, that the moment the 
orator loses command of his audience, the audience 
commands him. So, in poetry, the master rushes 
to deliver his thought, and the words and images 
fly to him to express it; whilst colder moods are 
forced to respect the ways of saying it, and insinu- 
ate, or, as it were, muffle the fact, to suit the poverty 
or caprice of their expression, so that they only 
hint the matter, or allude to it, being unable to fuse 
and mould their words and images to fluid obedi- 
ence. See how Shakspeare grapples at once with 
the main problem of the tragedy, as in " Lear " and 
" Macbeth," and the opening of " The Merchant of 
Venice." 

All writings must be in a degree exoteric, written 
to a human should or would, instead of to the fatal 
is: this holds even of the bravest and sincerest 
writers. Every writer is a skater, and must go 



28 POETRY AND IMAGINATION. 

partly where lie would, and partly where the skates 
carry him; or a sailor, who can only land where 
sails can be blown. And yet it is to be added, that 1 
high poetry exceeds the fact, or- nature itself, just ^ 
as skates allow the good skater far more grace than 
his best walking would show, or sails more than 
riding. The poet writes from a real experience, 
the amateur feigns one. Of course, one draws the 
bow with his fingers, and the other with the strength 
of his body ; one speaks with his lips, and the other 
with a chest voice. Talent amuses, but if your 
verse has not a necessary and autobiographic basis, 
though under whatever gay poetic veils, it shall not 
waste my time. 

For poetry is faith. To the poet the world is 
virgin soil: all is practicable; the men are ready 
for virtue ; it is always time to do right. He - is a 
true re-commencer, or Adam in the garden again. 
He affirms the applicability of the ideal law to this 
moment and the present knot of affairs: Parties, 
lawyers, and men of the world will invariably dis- 
pute such an application as romantic and danger- 
ous : they admit the general truth, but they and 
their affair always constitute a case in bar of the 
statute. Free-trade, they concede, is very well as a 
principle, but it is never quite the time for its adop- 
tion without prejudicing actual interests. Chas- 
tity, they admit, is very well, — but then think of 
Mirabeau's passion and temperament ! — Eternal 



VERACITY. 29 

laws are very well, wliicli admit no violation, — 
but so extreme were the times and manners of 
mankind, that you must admit miracles, -^ for the 
times constituted a case. Of course, we know 
what you say, that legends are found in all tribes, 
— but this legend is different. And so, throughout, 
the poet affirms the laws ; prose busies itseK with 
exceptions, — with the local and individual. 

I require that the poem should impress me, so 
that after I have shut the book, it shall recall me 
to itself, or that passages should. And inestimable 
is the criticism of memory as a corrective to first 
impressions. We are dazzled at first by new words 
and brilliancy of color, which occupy the fancy 
and deceive the judgment. But all this is easily 
forgotten. Later, the thought, the happy image 
which expressed it, and which was a true experi- 
ence of the poet, recurs to mind, and sends me 
back in search of the book. And 1 wish that the 
poet should foresee this habit of readers, and omit 
all but the important passages. Shakspeare is 
made up of important passages, like Damascus 
steel made up of old nails. Homer has his own, — 

**One omen is good, to die for one's country" ; 

and again, — 

*' They heal their griefs, for curable are the hearts of the nohle." 

Write, that I may know you. Style betrays you. 



30 POETRY AND IMAGINATION. 

as your eyes do. We detect at once by it whether 
the writer has a firm grasp on his fact or thought, 
— exists at the moment for that alone, or whether 
he has one eye apologizing, deprecatory, turned 
on his reader. In proportion always to his posses- 
sion of his thought is his defiance of his readers. 
There is no choice of words for him who clearly 
sees "the truth. That provides him with the best 
word. 

Great design belongs to a poem, and is better 
than any skill of execution, — but how rare ! I find 
it in the poems of Wordsworth, — " Laodamia," and 
the " Ode to Dion," and the plan of " The Eecluse." 
We want design, and do not forgive the bards if 
they have only the art of enamelling. We want an 
architect, and they bring us an upholsterer. 

If your subject do not appear to you the flower 
of the world at this moment, you have not rightly 
chosen it. No matter what it is, grand or gay, 
national or private, if it has a natural prominence 
to you, work away until you come to the heart 
of it : then it will, though it were a sparrow or a 
spider-web, as fully represent the central law, and 
draw all tragic or joyful illustration, as if it were 
the book of Genesis or the book of Doom. The 
subject — we must so often say it — is indifferent. 
Any word, every word in language, every circum- 
stance, becomes poetic in the hands of a higher 
thought. 



VERACITY. 31 

The test or measure of poetic genius is the 
power to read the poetry of affairs, — to fuse the 
circumstance of to-day; not to use Scott's antique 
superstitions, or Shakspeare's, but to convert those 
of the nineteenth century, and of the existing na- 
tions, into universal symbols. 'T is easy to re- 
paint the mythology of the Greeks, or of the 
Catholic Church, the feudal castle, the crusade, the 
martyrdoms of mediaeval Europe; but to point 
out where the same creative force is now working 
in our own houses and public assemblies, to con- 
vert the vivid energies acting at this hour, in New 
York and Chicago and San Francisco, into univer- 
sal symbols, requires a subtile and commanding 
thought. 'T is boyish in Swedenborg to cumber 
himself with the dead scurf of Hebrew antiquity, as 
if the Divine creative energy had fainted in his own 
century. American life storms about us daily, and 
is slow to find a tongue. This contemporary in- 
sight is transubstantiation, the conversion of daily 
bread into the holiest symbols; and every man 
would be a poet, if his intellectual digestion were 
perfect. The test of the poet is the power to take 
the passing day, with its news, its cares, its fears, as 
he shares them, and hold it up to a divine reason, 
till he sees it to have a purpose and beauty, and to 
be related to astronomy and history, and the eternal 
order of the world. Then the dry twig blossoms in 
his hand. He is calmed and elevated. 



32 POETRY AND IMAGINATION. 

The use of " occasional poems " is to give leave 
to originality. Every one delights in the felicity 
frequently shown in our drawing-rooms. In a 
game-party or picnic poem each WTiter is released 
from the solemn rhythmic traditions which alarm 
and suffocate his fancy, and the result is that one 
of the partners offers a poem in a new style that 
hints at a new literature. Yet the writer holds it 
cheap, and could do the like all day. On the stage, 
the farce is commonly far better given than the 
tragedy, as the stock actors understand the farce, 
and do not understand the tragedy. The writer in 
the parlor has more presence of mind, more wit and 
fancy, more play of thought, on the incidents that 
occur at table, or about the house, than in the poli- 
tics of Germany or Eome. Many of the fine poems 
of Herrick, Jonson, and their contemporaries had 
this casual origin. 

I know there is entertainment and room for tal- 
ent in the artist's selection of ancient or remote 
subjects ; as when the poet goes to India, or to 
Eome, or Persia, for his fable. But I believe no- 
body knows better than he, that herein he consults 
his ease, rather than his strength or his desire. He 
is very well convinced that the great moments of 
life are those in which his own house, his own body, 
the tritest and nearest ways and words and things, 
have been illuminated into prophets and teachers. 
What else is it to be a poet ? What are his gar- 



VERACITY. 33 

land and singing robes ? What but a sensibility 
so keen that the scent of an elder-blow, or the 
timber-yard and corporation-works of a nest of pis- 
mires is event enough for him, — all emblems and 
personal appeals to him. His wreath and robe is to 
do what he enjoys ; emancipation' from other men's 
questions, and glad study of his own ; escape from 
the gossip and routine of society, and the allowed 
right and practice of making better. He does not 
give his hand, but in sign of giving his heart ; he 
is not ■ affable with all, but silent, uncommitted, or 
in love, as his heart leads him. There is no subject 
that does not belong to him, — politics, economy, 
manufactures, and stock-brokerage, as much as sun- 
sets and souls ; only, these things, placed in their 
true order, are poetry ; displaced, or put in kitchen 
order, they are unpoetic. Malthus is the right 
organ of the English proprietors ; but we shall 
never understand political economy, until Burns or 
Beranger or some poet shall teach it in songs, and 
he will not teach Malthusianism. 

Poetry is the gai science. The trait and test of 
the poet is that he builds, adds, and affirms. The 
critic destroys: the poet says nothing but what 
helps somebody ; let others be distracted with cares, 
he is exempt. All their pleasures are tinged with 
pain. All his pains are edged with pleasure. The 
gladness he imparts he shares. As one of the old 
Minnesingers sung, — - 

2* O 



34 POETRY AND IMAGINATION. 

** Oft have I heard, and now believe it true, 
Whom man delights in, God delights in too." 

Poetry is the consolation of mortal men. They 
live cabined, cribbed, confined, in a narrow and 
trivial lot, — in wants, pains, anxieties, and super- 
stitions, in profligate politics, in personal animosi- 
ties, in mean employments, — and victims of these ; 
and the nobler powers untried, unknown. A poet 
comes, who lifts the veil ; gives them glimpses of 
the laws of the universe ; shows them the circum- 
stance as illusion; shows that nature is only a 
language to express the laws, which are grand and 
beautiful, — and lets them, by his songs, into some 
of the realities. Socrates ; the Indian teachers of the 
Maia ; the Bibles of the nations; Shakspeare, Milton, 
Hafiz, Ossian, the Welsh Bards, — these all deal with 
nature and history as means and symbols, and not as 
ends. With such guides they begin to see that what 
they had called pictures are realities, and the mean 
life is pictures. And this is achieved by words; 
for it is a few oracles spoken by perceiving men 
that are the texts on which religions and states are 
founded. And this perception has at once its moral 
sequence. Ben Jonson said, "The principal end 
of poetry is to inform men in the just reason of 
living." 

Creation. — But there is a third step which poetry 
takes, and which seems higher than the others. 



CREATION. 35 

namely, creation, or ideas taking forms of their own, 

— when the poet invents the fable, and invents the 
language which his heroes speak. He reads in the 
word or action of the man its yet untold results. His 
inspiration is power to carry out and complete the 
metamorphosis, which, in the imperfect kinds, ar- 
rested for ages, — in the perfecter, proceeds rapidly 
in the same individual. For poetry is science, and 
the poet a truer logician. Men in the courts or in 
the street think themselves logical, and the poet 
whimsical Do they think there is chance or wil- 
fulness in what he sees and tells ? To be sure, we 
demand of him what he demands of himself, — 
veracity, first of all. But with that, he is the law- 
giver, as being an exact reporter of the essential 
law. He knows that he did not make his thought, 

— no, his thought made him, and made the sun 
and the stars. Is the solar system good art and 
architecture ? the same wise achievement is in the 
human brain also, can you only wile it from inter- 
ference and marring. We cannot look at works of 
art but they teach us how near man is to creating. 
Michel Angelo is largely filled with the Creator 
that made and makes men. How much of the 
original craft remains in him, and he a mortal man I 
In him and the like perfecter brains the instinct is 
resistless, knows the right way, is melodious, and 
at aU points divine. The reason we set so high 
a value on any poetry, — as often on a line or a 



36 POETKY AND IMAGINATION. 

phrase as on a poem, — is, that it is a new work of 
IlTature, as a man is. It must be as new as foam 
and as old as the rock. But a new verse comes 
once in a hundred years ; therefore Pindar, Hafiz, 
Dante, speak so proudly of what seems to the 
clown a jingle. 

The writer, like the priest, must be exempted 
from secular labor. His work needs a frolic health ; 
he must be at the top of his condition. In that 
prosperity he is sometimes caught up into a per- 
ception of means and " materials, of feats and fine 
arts, of fairy machineries and funds of power hith- 
erto utterly unknown to him, whereby he can trans- 
fer his visions to mortal canvas, or reduce them 
into iambic or trochaic, into lyric or heroic rhyme. 
These successes are not less admirable and astonish- 
ing to the poet than they are to his audience. He 
has seen something which all the mathematics and 
the best industry could never bring him unto. N'ow 
at this rare elevation above his usual sphere, he 
has come into new circulations, the marrow of the 
world is in his bones, the opulence of forms begins 
to pour into his intellect, and he is permitted to 
dip his brush into the old paint-pot with which 
birds, flowers, the human cheek, the living rock, 
the broad landscape, the ocean, and the eternal sky 
were painted. 

These fine fruits of judgment, poesy, and senti- 
ment, when once their hour is struck, and the world 



CREATION. 37 

is ripe for them, know as well as coarser how to 
feed and replenish themselves, and maintain their 
stock alive, and multiply; for roses and violets 
renew their race like oaks, and flights of painted 
moths are as old as the Alleghanies. The balance 
of the world is kept, and dewdrop and haze and the 
pencil of light are as long-lived as chaos and dark- 
ness. 

Our science is always abreast of our self-knowl- 
edge. Poetry begins, or all becomes poetry, when 
we^look from the centre outward, and are using all 
as if the mind made it. That only ^an we see 
which we are, and which we make. The weaver 
sees gingham; the broker sees the stock-list; the 
politician, the ward and county votes; the poet 
sees the horizon, and the shores of matter lying on 
the sky, the interaction of the elements, — the large 
effect of laws which correspond to the inward laws 
which he knows, and so are but a kind of exten- 
sion of himself. " The attractions are proportional 
to the destinies." Events or things are only the 
fulfilment of the prediction of the faculties. Bet- 
ter men saw heavens and earths; saw noble in- 
struments of noble souls. We see railroads, mills, 
and banks, and we pity the poverty of these 
dreaming Buddhists. There was as much creative 
force then as now, but it made globes, and astro- 
nomic heavens, instead of broadcloth and wine- 



38 POETRY AND IMAGINATION. 

The poet is enamored of thoughts and laws. 
These know their way, and, guided by them, he is 
ascending from an interest in visible things to an 
interest in that which they signify, and from the 
part of a spectator to the part of a maker. And as 
everything streams and advances, as every faculty 
and every desire is procreant, and every perception 
is a destiny, there is no limit to his hope. " Any- 
thing, child, that the mind covets, from the milk 
of a cocoa to the throne of. the three worlds, thou 
mayest obtain, by keeping the law of thy members 
and the law of thy mind." It suggests that there is 
higher poetry than we write or read. 

Eightly, poetry is organic. We cannot know 
things by words and writing, but only by taking a 
central position in the universe, and living in its 
forms. We sink to rise. 

"None any work can frame, 
Unless himself become the same." 

All the parts and forms of nature are the expression 
or production of divine faculties, and the same are 
in us. And the fascination of genius for us is this 
awful nearness to Nature's creations. 

I have heard that the Germans think the creator 
of Trim and Uncle Toby, though he never wrote a 
verse, a greater poet than Cowper, and that Gold- 
smith's title to the name is not from his " Deserted 
Village," but derived from the " Vicar of Wake- 
field." Better examples are Shakspeare's Ariel, 



CREATION. 39 

his Caliban, and Ms fairies in the " Midsum- 
mer Night's Dream." Barthold Niebuhr said well, 
" There is little merit in inventing a happy idea, 
or attractive situation, so long as it is only the 
author's voice which we hear. As a being whom 
we have called into life by magic arts, as soon as 
it has received existence acts independently of the 
master's impulse, so the poet creates his persons, 
and then watches and relates what they do and say. 
Such creation is poetry, in the literal sense of the 
term, and its possibiKty is an unfathomable enigma. 
The gushing fulness of speech belongs to the poet, 
and it flows from the lips of each of his magic 
beings in the thoughts and words peculiar to its 
nature." * 

This force of representation so plants his figures 
before him that he treats them as real; talks to 
them as if they were bodily there ; puts words in 
their mouth such as they should have spoken, and 
is affected by them as by persons. Vast is the dif- 
ference between writing clean verses for magazines, 
and creating these new persons and situations, — 
new language with emphasis and reality. The hu- 
mor of FalstafP, the terror of Macbeth, have each 
their swarm of fit thoughts and images, as if Shak- 
speare had known and reported the men, instead 
of inventing them at his desk. This power ap- 
pears not only in the outline or portrait of his 

* Niebuhr, Letters, etc., Vol. III. p. 196. 



40 POETEY A.ND IMAGINATION. 

actors, but also in the bearing and behavior and 
style of each individual. Ben Jonson told Drum- 
mond "that Sidney did not keep a decorum in 
making every one speak as well as himself." 

This reminds me that we all have one key to 
this miracle of the poet, and the dunce has expe- 
riences that may explain Shakspeare to him, — 
one key, namely, dreams. In dreams we are true 
poets; we create the persons of the drama; we 
give them appropriate figures, faces, costume ; they 
are perfect in their organs, attitude, manners : more- 
over, they speak after their own characters, not 
ours ; — they speak to us, and we listen with sur- 
prise to what they say. Indeed, I doubt if the best 
poet has yet written any five-act play that can 
compare in thoroughness of invention with^this 
unwritten play in fifty acts, composed by the dull- 
est snorer on the floor of the watch-house. 

Melody, Rhyme, Form. — Music and rhyme are 
among the earliest, pleasures of the child, and, in 
the history of literature, poetry precedes prose. 
Every one may see, as he rides on the highway 
through an uninteresting landscape, how a little 
water instantly relieves the monotony: no matter 
what objects are near it, — a gray rock, a grass- 
patch, an alder-bush, or "a stake,- — they become 
beautiful by being reflected. It is rhyme to the 
eye, and explains the charm of rhyme to the ear. 



MELODY, RHYME, FOKM. 41 

Shadows please us as still finer rhymes. Archi- 
tecture gives the like pleasure by the repetition of 
equal parts in a colonnade, in a row of windows, 
or in wings; gardens, by the symmetric contrasts 
of the beds and walks. In society, you have this 
figure in a bridal company, where a choir of white- 
robed maidens give the charm of living statues; 
in a funeral procession, where all wear black ; in a 
regiment of soldiers in uniform. 

The universality of this taste is proved by our 
habit of casting our facts into rhyme to remember 
them better, as so many proverbs may show. Who 
would hold the order of the almanac so fast but for 
the ding-dong, 

"Thirty days hath September," etc. ; 

or of the Zodiac, but for 

"The Ram, the Bull, the heavenly Twins," etc. ? 

We are lovers of rh3ane and return, period and 
musical reflection. The babe is lulled to sleep by 
the nurse's song. Sailors can Avork better for their 
yo-Tieave-o. Soldiers can march better and fight 
better for the drum and trumpet. Metre begins 
with pulse-beat, and the length of lines in songs 
and poems is determined by the inhalation and ex- 
halation of the lungs. If you hum or whistle the 
rhythm of the common English metres, — of the 
decasyllabic quatrain, or the octosyllabic with alter- 
nate sexisyllabiCj or other rhythms, you can easily 



42 POETRY AND IMAGINATION. 

believe these metres to be organic, derived from the 
human pulse, and to be therefore not proper to one 
nation, but to mankind. I think you will also find 
a charm heroic, plaintive, pathetic, in these caden- 
ces, and be at once set on searching for the words 
that can rightly fill these vacant beats. Young 
people like rhyme, drum-beat, tune, things in pairs 
and alternatives ; and, in higher degrees, we know 
the instant power of music upon our temperaments 
to change our mood, and give us its own : and hu- 
man passion, seizing these constitutional tunes, aims 
to fill them with appropriate words, or marry music 
to thought, believing, as we believe of all marriage, 
that matches are made in heaven, and that for 
every thought its proper melody or rhyme exists, 
though the odds are immense against our finding it, 
and only genius can rightly say the banns. 

Another form of rhyme is iterations of phrase, as 
the record of the death of Sisera : — 

" At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down : at her 
feet he bowed, he fell: where he bowed, there he fell 
down dead." 

The fact is made conspicuous, nay, colossal, by 
this simple rhetoric. 

" They shall perish, but thou shalt endure : yea, all of 
them shall wax old like a garment ; as a vesture shalt 
thou change them, and they shall be changed : but thou 
art the same, and thy years shaU have no end." 



MELODY, RHYME, FORM. 43 

Milton delights in these iterations : — 

** Though fallen on evil days, 
On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues." 

"Was I deceived, or did a sable cloud 
Turn forth its silver lining on the night ? 
I did not err, there does a sable cloud 
Turn forth its silver lining on the night." 

Gomus, 

"A little onward lend thy guiding hand. 
To these dark steps a little farther on." 



So in our songs and ballads the refrain skilfully- 
used, and deriving some novelty or better sense in 
each of many verses : — 

" Busk thee, busk thee, my bonny bonny bride, 
Busk thee, busk thee, my winsome marrow." 

Hamilton". 

Of course rhyme soars and refines with the growth 
of the mind. The boy liked the drum, the people 
liked an overpowering jewsharp tune. Later they 
like to transfer that rhyme to life, and to (Jetect a 
melody as prompt and perfect in their daily affairs. 
Omen and coincidence show the rhythmical struc- 
ture of man; hence the taste for signs, sortilege, 
prophecy and fulfilment, anniversaries, etc. By and 
by, when they apprehend real rhymes, namely, the 
correspondence of parts in nature, — acid and alkali, 
body and mind, man and maid, character and his- 
tory, action and reaction, — they do not longer value 
rattles and ding-dongs, or barbaric word-jingle. As- 



44 POETEY AND IMAGINATION. 

tronomy, Botany, Chemistry, Hydraulics and the 
elemental forces have their own periods and returns, 
their own grand strains of harmony not less exact, 
up to the primeval apothegm " that there is nothing 
on earth which is not in the heavens in a heavenly 
form, and nothing in the heavens which is not on 
the earth in an earthly form." They furnish the 
poet with grander pairs and alternations, and will 
require an equal expansion in his metres. 

There is under the seeming poverty of metres an 
infinite variety, as every artist knows. A right ode 
(however nearly it may adopt conventional metre, 
as the Spenserian, or the heroic blank- verse, or one 
of the fixed lyric metres) will by any sprightliness 
be at once lifted out of conventionality, and wiU 
modify the metre. Every good poem that I know 
I recall by its rhythm also. Ehyme is a pretty good 
measure of the latitude and opulence of a writer. 
If unskilful, he is at once detected by the poverty 
of his chimes. A small, well-worn, sprucely brushed 
vocabulary serves him. ]N'ow try Spenser, Mario w. 
Chapman, and see how wide they fly for weapons, 
and how rich and lavish their profusion. In their 
rhythm is no manufacture, but a vortex, or musical 
tornado, which falling on words and the experience 
of a learned mind, whirls these materials into the 
same grand order as planets and moons obey, and 
seasons, and monsoons. 

There are also prose poets. Thomas Taylor, the 



MELODY, RHYME, FORM. 45 

Platonist, for instance, is really a better man of 
imagination, a better poet, or perhaps I sboTild say 
a better feeder to a poet, than any man between 
Milton and Wordsworth. Thomas Moore had the 
magnanimity to say, " If Burke and Bacon were not 
poets (measured lines not being necessary to con- 
stitute one), he did not know what poetry meant." 
And every good reader will easily recall expressions 
or passages in works of pure science which have 
given him the same pleasure which he seeks in pro- 
fessed poets. Eichard Owen, the eminent paleon- 
tologist, said : — 

"All hitherto observed causes of extirpation point 
either to continuous slowly operating geologic changes, 
or to no greater sudden cause than the, so to speak, 
spectral appearance of mankind on a Hmited tract of land 
not before inhabited." 

St. Augustine complains to God of his friends 
offering him the books of the philosophers : — 

" And these were the dishes in which they brought 
to me, being hungry, the Sun and the Moon instead of 
Thee." 

It would not be easy to refuse to Sir Thomas 
Browne's "Fragment on Mummies" the claim of 
poetry : — 

" Of their living habitations they made little account, 
conceiving of them but as hospitia, or inns, while they 
adorned the sepulchres of the dead, and, planting there- 



46 POETRY AND IMAGINATION. 

on lasting bases, defied the crumbling toucbes of time, 
and the misty vaporousness of oblivion. Yet all were 
but Babel vanities. Time sadly overcometh all things, 
and is now dominant, and sitteth upon a Sphinx, and 
looketh unto Memphis and old Thebes, while his sister 
Oblivion reclineth semi-somnous on a pyramid, gloriously 
triumphing, making puzzles of Titanian erections, and 
turning old glories into dreams. History sinketh be- 
neath her cloud. The traveller as he paceth through 
those deserts asketh of her. Who builded them? and 
she mumbleth something, but what it is he heareth 
not." 

Ehyme, being a kind of music, shares this advan- 
tage with music, that it has a privilege of speaking 
truth which all Philistia is unable to challenge. 
Music is the poor man's Parnassus. With the first 
note of the flute or horn, or the first strain of a 
song, we quit the world of common-sense, and launch 
on the sea of ideas and emotions : we pour contempt 
on the prose you so magnify ; yet the sturdiest 
Philistine is silent. The like allowance is the pre- 
scriptive right of poetry. You shall not speak ideal 
truth in prose uncontradicted : you may in verse. 
The best thoughts run into the best words ; imagi- 
native and affectionate thoughts into music and 
metre. We ask for food and fire, we talk of our 
work, our tools, and material necessities in prose, 
that is, without any elevation or aim at beauty ; but 
when we rise into the world of thought, and think 



MELODY, RHYME, FORM. 47 

of these things only for what they signify, speech 
refines into order and harmony. I know what you 
say of mediaeval "tjarharism and sleighb ell-rhyme, 
but we have not done with music, no, nor with 
rhyme, nor must console ourselves with prose poets 
so long as boys whistle and girls sing. 

Let Poetry then pass, if it will, into music and 
rhyme. That is the form which itself puts on. 
We do not enclose watches in wooden, but in crys- 
tal cases, and rhyme is the transparent frame that 
allows almost the pure architecture of thought to 
become visible to the mental eye. Substance is 
much, but so are mode and form much. The poet, 
like a delighted boy, brings you heaps of rainbow 
bubbles, opaline, air-borne, spherical as the world, 
instead of a few drops of soap and water, Victor 
Hugo says well, " An idea steeped in verse becomes 
suddenly more incisive and more brilliant : the iron 
becomes steel." Lord Bacon, we are told, "loved 
not to see poesy go on other feet than poeti- 
cal dactyls and spondees"; and Ben Jonson said, 
"that Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved 
hanging." 

Poetry being an attempt to express, not the com- 
mon-sense, as the avoirdupois of the hero, or his, 
structure in feet and inches, but the beauty and 
soul in his aspect as it shines to fancy and feeling, 
— and so of all other objects in nature, — runs into 
fable, personifies every fact : — " the clouds clapped 



48 POETRY AND IMAGINATION. 

their hands," — "the hills skipped/' — "the sky 
spoke." This is the substance, and this treatment 
always attempts a metrical grace. Outside of the 
nursery the beginning of literature is the prayers 
of a people, and they are always hymns, poetic, — 
the mind allowing itself range, and therewith is 
ever a corresponding freedom in the style which 
becomes lyrical. The prayers of nations are rhyth- 
mic, — have iterations, and alliterations, Kke the 
marriage-service and burial-service in our liturgies. 
Poetry will never be a simple means, as when 
history or philosophy is rhymed, or laureate odes 
on state occasions are written. . Itself must be its 
own end, or it is nothing. The difference between 
poetry and stock-poetry is this, that in the latter 
the rhythm is given, and the sense adapted to it ; 
while in the former the sense dictates the rhythm. 
I might even say that the rhyme is there in the 
theme, thought, and image themselves. Ask the 
fact for the form. For a verse is not a vehicle to 
carry a sentence as a jewel is carried in a case : the 
verse must be alive, and inseparable from its con- 
tents, as the soul of man inspires and directs the 
body ; and we measure the inspiration by the music. 
In reading prose, I am sensitive as soon as a sen- 
tence drags; but in poetry, as soon as one word 
drags. Ever as the thought mounts, the expression 
mounts. 'T is cumulative also ; the poem is made 
up of lines each of which filled the ear of the poet 



MELODY, EHYME, FORM. 49 

in its turn, so that mere synthesis produces a work 
quite superhuman. 

Indeed, the masters sometimes rise above them- 
selves to strains which charm their readers, and 
which neither any competitor could outdo, nor the 
bard himself again equal. Try this strain of Beau- 
mont and Fletcher : — 

"Hence, all ye vain deliglits, 
As short as are the nights 
In which you spend your folly ! 
There 's naught in this life sweet, 
If men were wise to see't, 
But only melancholy. 
Oh ! sweetest melancholy ! 
Welcome, folded arms and fixed eyes, 
A sigh that piercing mortifies, 
A look that's fastened to the ground, 
A tongue chained up, without a sound ; 
Fountain-heads and pathless groves, 
Places which pale Passion loves. 
Midnight walks, when all the fowls 
Are warmly housed, save bats and owls ; 
A midnight hell, a passing groan. 
These are the sounds we feed upon, 
Then stretch our bones in a still, gloomy valley. 
Nothing's so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy." 

Keats disclosed by certain lines in his " Hyperion " 
this inward skill ; and Coleridge showed at least his 
love and appetency for it. It appears in Ben Jon- 
son's songs, including certainly "The faery beam 
upon you," etc., Waller's "Go, lovely rose!" Her- 
bert's " Virtue " and " Easter," and Lovelace's lines 

3 D 



50 POETRY AND IMAGINATION. 

" To Althea " and " To Lucasta," and CoUins's " Ode, 
to Evening," all bnt tlie last verse, which is aca- 
demical. Perhaps this dainty style of poetry is not 
producible to-day, any more than a right Gothic 
cathedral. It belonged to a time and taste which 
is not in the world. 

As the imagination is not a talent of some men, 
but is the health of every man, so also is this joy of 
musical expression. I know the pride of mathema- 
ticians and materialists, bnt they cannot conceal 
from me their capital want. The critic, the philoso- 
pher, is a failed poet. Gray avows " that he thinks 
even a bad verse as good a thing or better ,than 
the best observation that was ever made on it." I 
honor the naturalist ; I honor the geometer, but he 
has before him higher power and happiness than he 
knows. Yet we will leave to the masters their own 
forms. IsTewton may be permitted to call Terence 
a play-book, and to wonder at the frivolous taste 
for rhymers; he only predicts, one would say, a 
grander poetry : he only shows that he is not yet 
reached ; that the poetry which satisfies more youth- 
ful souls is not such to a mind like his, accustomed 
to grander harmonies ; — this being a child's whistle 
to his ear; that the music must rise to a loftier 
strain, up to Handel, up to Beethoven, up to the 
thorough-bass of the sea-shore, up to the largeness 
of astronomy : at last that great heart will hear in 
the music beats like its own: the waves of melody 



BARDS AND TROUVEURS. 51 

will wash and float him also, and set him into con- 
cert and harmony. 

Bards and Troiiveurs. — The metallic force of 
primitive words makes the superiority of the remains 
of the rude ages. It costs the early bard little talent 
to chant more impressively than the later, more cul- 
tivated poets. His advantage is that his words are 
things, each the lucky sound which described the 
fact, and we listen to him as we do to the Indian, 
or the hunter, or miner, each of whom represents 
his facts as accurately as the cry of the woK or the 
eagle tells of the forest or the air they inhabit. 
The original force, the direct sijieU of the earth or 
the sea, is in these ancient poems, the Sagas of the 
N"orth, the N'ibelungen Lied, the songs and ballads' 
of the English and Scotch. 

I find or fancy more true poetry, the love of the 
vast and the ideal, in the Welsh and bardic frag- 
ments of Taliessin and his successors than in many 
volumes of British Classics. An intrepid magnilo- 
quence appears in all the bards, as : — 

" The whole ocean flamed as one wound." 

King Eegner Lodbodk. 

*• God himself cannot procure good for the wicked." 

Welsh Triad. 

A favorable specimen is TaLiessin's "Invocation 
of the Wind " at the door of Castle Teganwy. 



52 POETRY AND IMAGINATION. 

"Discover thou wliat it is, — 
The stnong creature from before the flood, 
Without flesh, without bone, without head, without feet, 
It will neither be younger nor older than at the beginning ; 
It has no fear, nor the rude wants of created things. 
Great God ! how the sea whitens when it comes ! 
It is in the field, it is in the wood, 
Without hand, without foot, 
Without age, without season, 
It is always of the same age with the ages of ages, 
And of equal breadth with the surface of the earth. 
It was not bom, it sees not, 
And is not seen ; it does not come when desired ; 
It has no form, it bears no burden, 
For it is void of sin. 

It makes no perturbation in the place where God wills it. 
On the sea, on the land." 

In one of Ms poems tie asks : — 

•* Is there but one course to the wind ? 
But one to the water of the sea ? 
Is there but one spark in the fire of boundless energy ? " 

He says of Ms hero, Cunedda, — ■ 

** He will assimilate, he will agree with the deep and the shallow." 

To another, — 

"When I lapse to a sinful word. 
May neither you, nor others hear." 

Of an enemy, — 

" The caldron of the sea w^s bordered round by his 
land, but it would not boil the food of a coward." 

To an exile on an island he says, — 

" The heavy blue chain of the sea didst thou, just 
man, endure," 



BARDS AND TROUVEUES. 63 

Another bard in like tone says, — 

" I am possessed of songs such as no son of man can 
repeat ; one of them is called the 'Helper' j it will help 
thee at thy need in sickness, grief, and all adversities. 
I know a song which I need only to sing when men 
have loaded me with bonds : when I sing it, my chains 
fall in pieces and I walk forth at liberty." 

The N"orsenien have no less faith in poetry and 
its power, when they describe it thus : — 

"OdiQ spoke everything in rhyme. He and his 
temple-gods were called song-smiths. He could make 
his enemies in battle blind or deaf, and their weapons so 
blunt that they could no more cut than a willow-twig. - 
Odin taught these arts in runes or songs, which are 
called incantations."* 

The Crusades brought out the genius of France, 
in the twelfth century, when Pierre d'Auvergne 
said, — 

" I will sing a new song which resounds in my breast : 
never was a song good or beautiful which resembled any 
other." 

And Pons de Capdeuil declares, — 

" Since the air renews itself and softens, so must my 
heart renew itself, and what buds in it buds and grows 
outside of it." 

* Heimskringla, Vol. I. p. 221. 



64 POETRY AND IMAGINATION. 

There is in every poem a height which attracts 
more than other parts, and is best remembered. 
Thus, in " Morte d' Arthur," I remember nothing so 
well as Sir Gawain's parley with Merlin in his 
wonderful prison: — 

"After the disappearance of Merlin from King Ar- 
thur's court he was seriously missed, and many knights 
set out in search of him. Among others was Sir Gawain, 
who pursued his search till it was time to return to the 
court. He came into the forest of BroceHande, lament- 
ing as he went along. Presently, he heard the voice of 
one groaning on his right hand; looking that way, he 
could see nothing save a kind of smoke which seemed 
like air, and through which he could not pass ; and this 
impediment made him so wrathful that it deprived him 
of speech. Presently he heard a voice which said, 
'Gawain, Gawain, be not out of heart, for everything 
which must happen will come to pass.' And when he 
heard the voice which thus called him by his right 
name, he replied, ' Who can this be who hath spoken to 
me ? ' ' How,' said the voice, * Sir Gawain, know you me 
not 1 You were wont to know me weU, but thus things 
are interwoven and thus the proverb says true, " Leave 
the court and the court will leave you." So is it with me. 
Whilst I served King Arthur, I was well known by you 
and by other barons, but because I have left the court, 
I am. known no longer, and put in forgetfulness, which 
I ought not to be if faith reigned in the world.' When 
Sir Gawain heard the voice which spoke to him thus, he 



BARDS AND TEOUVEURS. 55 

thought it was Merlin, and he answered, * Sir, certes I 
ought to know you well, for many times I have heard 
your words. I pray you appear before me so that' I 
may be able to recognize you.' ' Ah, sir,' said Merlin, 
* you will never see me more, and that grieves me, but 
I cannot remedy it, and when you shall have departed 
from this place, I shall nevermore speak to you nor to 
any other person, save only my mistress ; for never other 
person will be able to discover this place for anything 
which may befall; neither shall I ever go out from 
hence, for in the world there is no such strong tower as 
this wherein I am confined ; and it is neither of wood, 
nor of iron, nor of stone, but of air, without anything 
else ; and made by enchantment so strong, that it can 
never be demolished while the world lasts, neither can I 
go out, nor can any one come in, save she who hath 
enclosed me here, and who keeps me company when 
it pleaseth her : she cometh when she listeth, for her 
will is here.' ^ How, Merlin, my good friend,' said Sir 
Gawain, ^ are you restrained so strongly that you cannot 
deliver yourself nor make yourself visible unto me ; how 
can this happen, seeing that you are the wisest man in 
the worlds 'Eather,' said Merlin, *the greatest fool; 
for I well knew that all this would befall me, and I 
have been fool enough to love another more than my- 
self, for I taught my mistress that whereby she hath 
imprisoned me in such manner that none can set me 
free.' ' Certes, Merlin,' replied Sir Gawain, * of that I 
am right sorrowful, and so will King Arthur, my uncle, 
be, when he shall know it, as one who is making search 



56 POETRY AND IMAGINATION. 

after you througliout all countries/ * Well, 'said Mer- 
lin, * it must be borne, for never will lie see me, nor I 
Mm ; neither will any one speak with me again after 
you, it would be vain to attempt it ; for you yourself, 
when you have turned away, will never be able to find 
the place : but salute for me the king and the queen, 
and aU the barons, and teU them of my condition. You 
will find the king at Carduel in Wales ; and when you 
arrive there you will find there aU the companions who 
departed with you, and who at this day wiU return. 
E"ow then go in the name of God, who will protect and 
save the King Arthur, and the realm of Logres, and you 
also, as the best knights who are in the world.' With 
that Sir Gawain departed joyful and sorrowful ; joyful 
because of what Merlin had assured him should happen 
to him, and sorrowful that Merlin had thus been lost." 

Morals. — We are sometimes apprised that there 
is a mental power and creation more excellent than 
anything which is commonly called philosophy and 
literature ; that the high poets, — that Homer, Mil- 
ton, Shakspeare, do not fully content us. How 
rarely they offer us the heavenly bread ! The most 
they have done is to intoxicate us once and again 
with its taste. They have touched this heaven and 
retain afterwards some sparkle of it: they betray 
their belief that such discourse is possible. There 
is something — our brothers on this or that side of 
the sea do not know it or own it ; the eminent 
scholars of England, historians and reviewers, ro- 



MOEALS. 57 

mancers and poets included, might deny and blas- 
pheme it — which is setting us and them aside and 
the whole world also, and planting itself. To true 
poetry we shall sit down as the result and justifica- 
tion of the age in which it appears, and think light- 
ly of histories and statutes. ISTone of your parlor 
or piano verse, — none of your carpet poets, who 
are content to amuse, will satisfy us. Power, new 
power, is the good which the soul seeks. The po- 
etic gift we want, as the health and supremacy of 
man, — not rhymes and sonneteering, not book- 
inaking and bookselling; surely not cold spying 
and authorship. 

Is not poetry the little chamber in the brain 
where is generated the explosive force which, by 
gentle shocks, sets in action the intellectual world ? 
Bring us the bards who shall sing all our old ideas 
out of our heads, and new ones in; men-making 
poets ; poetry which, like the verses inscribed on 
Balder's columns in Breidablik, is capable of restor- 
ing the dead to life; — poetry like that verse of 
Saadi, which the angels testified " met the approba- 
tion of Allah in Heaven " ; — poetry which finds its 
rhymes and cadences in the rhymes and iterations 
of nature, and is the gift to men of new images and 
sjonbols, each the ensign and oracle of an age; that 
shall assimilate men to it, mould itself into re- 
ligions an^ mythologies, and impart its quality to 
. centuries ; — poetry which tastes the world and re- 

.3* 



68 ^ POETRY AND IMAGINATION. 

ports of it, upbuilding the world again in the 
thought ; 

" Not with tickling rhymes, 
But high and noble matter, such as flies 
From brains entranced, and filled with ecstasies." 

Poetry must be affirmative. It is the piety of 
the intellect. " Thus saith the Lord/' should begin 
the song. The poet who shall use nature as his 
hieroglyphic must have an adequate message to 
convey thereby. Therefore, when we speak of the 
Poet in any high sense, we are driven to such ex- 
amples as Zoroaster and Plato, St. John and Menu, 
with their moral burdens. The Muse shall be the 
counterpart of I^ature, and equally rich. I find her 
not often in books. We know ISTature, and figure 
her exuberant, tranquil, magnificent in her fertility, 
coherent ; so that every creation is omen of every 
other. She is not proud of the sea, of the stars, of 
space or time, or man or woman. All her kinds 
share the attributes of the selectest extremes. But 
in current literature I do not find her. Literature 
warps away from life, though at first it seems to 
bind it. In the world of letters how few command- 
ing oracles ! Homer did what he could, — Pindar, 
^schylus, and the Greek Gnomic poets and the 
tragedians." Dante was faithful when not carried 
away by his fierce hatreds. But in so many alcoves 
of English poetry I can count only nine or ten 
authors who are still inspirers and lawgivers to 
their race. 



MORALS. 59 

The supreme value of poetry is to educate us to a 
height beyond itself, or which it rarely reaches ; — 
the subduing mankind to order and virtue. He is 
the true Orpheus who writes his ode, not with syl- 
lables, but men. "In poetry," said Goethe, "only 
the really great and pure advances us, and this ex- 
ists as a second nature, either elevating us to itself, 
or rejecting us." The poet must let Humanity sit 
with the Muse in his head, as the charioteer sits 
with the hero in the Iliad. " Show me," said Sarona 
in the novel, "one wicked man who has written 
poetry, and I will show you where his poetry is 
not poetry ; or rather, I will show you in his poetry 
no poetry at all." * 

I have heard that there is a hope which precedes 
and must precede all science of the visible or the 
invisible world ; and that science is the realization 
of that hope in either region. I count the genius 
of Swedenborg and Wordsworth as the agents of a 
reform in philosophy, the bringing poetry back to 
nature, — to the marrying of nature and mind, un- 
doing the old divorce in which poetry had been 
famished and false, and nature had been suspected 
and pagan. The philosophy which a nation re- 
ceives, rules its religion, poetry, politics, arts, trades, 
and whole history. A good poem — say Shak- 
speare's " Macbeth," or " Hamlet," or the " Tempest " 
— goes about the world offering itself to reasonable 

* Miss Shepard's "Counterparts," Vol. I. p. 67. 



&0 POETRY AND IMAGINATION. 

men, who read it with joy and carry it to their reason- 
able neis^hbors. Thus it draws to it the wise and 
generous souls, confirming their secret thoughts, 
and, through their sympathy, really publishing it- 
self. It affects the characters of its readers by for- 
mulating their opinions and feelings, and inevitably 
prompting their daily action. If they build ships, 
they write " Ariel " or '' Prospero " or " Ophelia " on 
the ship's stern, and impart a tenderness and mys- 
tery to matters of fact. The ballad and romance 
work on the hearts of boys, who recite the rhymes 
to their hoops or their skates if alone, and these 
heroic songs or lines are remembered and determine 
many practical choices which they make later. Do 
you think Burns has had no influence on the life of 
men and women in Scotland, — has opened no eyes 
and ears to the face of nature and the dignity of 
man and the charm and excellence of woman ? 

We are a little civil, it must be owned, to Homer 
and ^schylus, to Dante and Shakspeare, and give 
them the benefit of the largest interpretation. We 
must be a little strict also, and ask whether, if we 
sit down at home, and do not go to Hamlet, Ham- 
let will come to us ? whether we shall find our 
tragedy written in his, — our hopes, wants, pains, 
disgraces, described to the life, — and the way 
opened to the paradise which ever in the best hour 
beckons us ? But our overpraise and idealization 
of famous masters is not in its origin a poor Bos- 



MORALS. 61 

wellism, but an impatience of mediocrity. The 
praise we now give to our heroes we shall unsay 
when we make larger demands. How fast we out- 
grow the hooks of the nursery, — then those that 
satisfied our youth. What we once admired as 
poetry has long since come to he a sound of tin 
pans ; and many ©f our later hooks we have out- 
grown. Perhaps Homer and Milton will he tin 
pans yet. Better not to he easily pleased. The poet 
should rejoice if he has taught us to despise his 
song ; if he has so moved us as to lift us, — to open 
the eye of the intellect to see farther and better. 

In proportion as a man's life comes into union 
with truth, his thoughts approach to a parallehsm 
with the currents of natural laws, so that he easily 
expresses his meaning by natural symbols, or uses 
the ecstatic or poetic speech. By successive states 
of mind all the facts of nature are for the first time 
interpreted. In proportion as his life departs from 
this simplicity, he uses circumlocution, - — by many 
words hoping to suggest what he cannot say. Vex- 
atious to find poets, who are by excellence the 
thinking and feeling of the world, deficient in truth 
of intellect and of affection. Then is conscience 
unfaithful, and thought unwise. To know the merit 
of Shakspeare, read " Faust.- I find " Faust " a little 
too modern and intelligible. We can find such 
a fabric at several mills, though a little inferior. 
" Faust " abounds in the disagreeable. The vice is 



62 POETRY AND IMAGINATION. 

prurient, learned^ Parisian. In the presence of 
Jove, Priapus may be allowed as an offset, but here 
he is an equal hero. The egotism, the wit, is cal- 
culated. The book is undeniably written by a 
master, and stands unhappily related to the whole 
modern world ; but it is a very disagreeable chap- 
ter of literature, and accuses the author as well as 
the times. Shakspeare could, no doubt, have been 
disagreeable, had he less genius, and if ugliness had 
attracted him. In short, our English nature and 
genius has made us the worst critics of Goethe, 

*' We, who speak the tongue 
That Shakspeare spake, the faith and manners hold 
Which Milton held." 

It is not style or rhymes, or a new image more 
or less, that imports, but sanity ; that life should 
not be mean ; that life should be an image in every 
part beautiful ; that the old forgotten splendors of 
the universe should glow again for us ; — - that we 
should lose our wit, but gain our reason. And 
when life is true to the poles of nature, the streams 
of truth will roll through us in song. 

Transcendency. — In a cotillon some persons 
dance and others await their turn when the music 
and the figure come to them. In the dance of God 
there is not one of the chorus but can and will 
begin to spin, monumental as he now looks, when- 
ever the music and figure reach his plac^ and duty. 



TRANSCENDENCY. 63 

celestial Bacchus ! drive them mad, — this multi- 
tude of vagabonds, hungry for eloquence, hungry for 
poetry, starving for symbols, perishing for want of 
electricity to vitalize this too much pasture, and in 
the long delay indemnifying themselves with the 
false wine of alcohol, of politics, or of money. 

Every man may be, and at some time a man is, 
lifted to a platform whence he looks beyond sense 
to moral and spiritual truth ; and in that mood deals 
sovereignly with matter, and strings worlds like 
beads upon his thought. The success with which 
this is done can alone determine how genuine is the 
inspiration. The poet is rare because he must be 
exquisitely vital and sympathetic, and, at the same 
time, immovably centred. In good society, nay, 
among the angels in heaven, is not everything 
spoken in fine parable, and not so servilely as it 
befell to the sense ? All is symbolized. Facts are 
not foreign, as they seem^ but related. Wait a little 
and we see the return of the remote hyperbolic 
curve. The solid men complain that the idealist 
leaves out the fundamental facts; the poet com- 
plains that the solid men leave out the sky. To 
every plant there are two powers ; one shoots down 
as rootlet, and one upward as tree. You must have 
eyes of science to see in the seed its nodes; you 
must have the vivacity of the poet to perceive in 
the thought its futurities. The poet is represent- 
ative, — whole man, diamond-merchant, symbolizer, 



64 POETRY AND IMAGINATION. 

emancipator ; in him the world projects a scribe's 
hand and writes the adequate genesis. The nature of 
things is flowing, a metamorphosis. The free spirit 
sympathizes not only with the actual form, but with 
the power or possible forms ; but for obvious muni- 
cipal or parietal uses, Grod has given us a bias or a 
rest on to-day's forms. Hence the shudder of joy 
with which in each clear moment we recognize the 
metamorphosis, because it is always a conquest, a 
surprise from the heart of things. One would say 
of the force in the works of nature, all depends on 
the battery. If it give one shock, we shall get to 
the fish form, and stop ; if two shocks, to the bird ; 
if three, to the quadruped; if four, to the man. 
Power of generalizing differences men. The num- 
ber of successive saltations the nimble thought can 
make, measures the difference between the highest 
and lowest of mankind. The habit of saliency, of 
not pausing but going on, is a sort of importation 
or domestication of the Divine effort in a man. 
After the largest circle has been drawn, a larger can 
be drawn around it. The problem of the poet is to 
unite freedom with precision ; to give the pleasure 
of color, and be not less the most powerful of sculp- 
tors. Music seems to you sufficient, or the subtle 
and delicate scent of lavender ; but Dante was free 
imagination, — all wings, — yet he wrote like Euclid. 
And mark the equality of Shakspeare to the comic, 
the tender and sweet, and to the grand and terrible. 



TRANSCENDENCY. 65 

A little more or less skill in whistling is of no 
account. See those weary pentameter tales of Dry- 
den and others. Turnpike is one thing and blue 
sky another. Let the poet, of all men, stop with 
his inspiration. The inexorable rule in the muses' 
court, either inspiration or silence, compels the bard 
to report only his supreme moments. It teaches 
the enormous force of a few words and in proportion 
to the inspiration checks loquacity. Much that we 
call poetry is but poKte verse. The high poetry 
which shall thrill and agitate mankind, restore 
youth and health, dissipate the dreams under which 
men reel and stagger, and bring in the new thoughts, 
the sanity and heroic aims of nations, is deeper hid 
and longer postponed than was America or Austra- 
lia, or the finding of steam or of the galvanic bat- 
tery. We must not conclude against poetry from 
the defects of poets. They are, in our experience, 
men of every degree of skill, — some of them only 
once or twice receivers of an inspiration, and pres- 
ently falling back on a low life. The drop of ichor 
that tingles in their veins has not yet refined their 
blood, and cannot lift the whole man to the diges- 
tion and function of ichor, — that is, to godlike na- 
ture. Time will be when ichor shall be their 
blood, when what are now glimpses and aspirations 
shall be the routine of the day. Yet even partial 
ascents to poetry and ideas are forerunners, and 
announce the dawn. In the mire of the sensual 



66 POETRY AND IMAGINATION. 

life, their religion, their poets, their admiration 
of heroes and benefactors, even their novel and 
newspaper, nay, their superstitions also, are hosts 
of ideals, — a cordage of ropes that hold themnp out 
of the slough. Poetry is inestimable as a lonely 
faith, a lonely protest in the uproar of atheism. 

But so many men are ill-born or ill-bred, — the 
brains are so marred, so imperfectly formed, unhe- 
roically, — brains of the sons of fallen men, — that 
the doctrine is imperfectly received. One man sees 
a spark or shimmer of the truth, and reports it, 
and his saying becomes a legend or golden proverb 
for ages, and other men report as much, but none 
wholly and well. Poems, — we have no poem. 
Whenever that angel shall be organized and appear 
on earth, the Iliad will be reckoned a poor ballad- 
grinding. I doubt never the riches of nature, the 
gifts of the future, the immense wealth of the mind. 
O yes, poets we shall have, mythology, symbols, 
religion, of our own. We, too, shall know how to 
take up all this industry and empire, this Western 
civilization, into thought, as easily as men did when 
arts were few ; but not by holding it high, but by 
holding it low. The intellect uses and is not used, 
— uses London and Paris and Berlin, east and west, 
to its end. The only heart that can help us is one 
that draws, not from our society, but from itself, a 
counterpoise to society. What if we find partiality 
and meanness in us ? The OTandeur of our life 



TRANSCENDENCY. 67 

exists in spite of us, — all over and under and with- 
in us, in what of us is inevitable and above our 
control. Men are facts as well as persons, and the 
involuntary part of their life so much as to fill the 
mind and leave them no countenance to say aught 
of what is so trivial as their selfish thinking and 
doing. Sooner or later that which is now life shall 
be poetry, and every fair and manly trait shall add 
a richer strain to the song. 



SOCIAL AIMS. 



SOCIAL AIMS. 

Much ill-natured criticism has been directed on 
American manners. I do not think it is to be re- 
sented. Eather, if we are wise, we shall listen and 
mend. Our critics will then be our best friends, 
though they did not mean it. But in every sense 
the subject of manners has a constant interest to 
thoughtful persons. Who does not delight in fine 
manners ? Their charm cannot be predicted or 
overstated. 'T is perpetual promise of more than 
can be fulfilled. It is music and sculpture and 
picture to many who do not pretend to apprecia- 
tion of those arts. It is even true that grace is 
more beautiful than beauty. Yet how impossible 
to overcome the obstacle of an unlucky tempera- 
ment, and acquire good manners, unless by living 
with the well-bred from the start ; and this makes 
the value of wise forethought to give ourselves and 
our children as much as possible the habit of culti- 
vated society. 

'T is an inestimable hint that I owe to a few per- 
sons of fine manners, that they make behavior the 
very first sign of force, — behavior, and not perform- 



72 SOCIAL AIMS. 

ance, or talent, or, much less, wealth. Whilst al- 
most everybody has a supplicating eye turned on 
events and things and other persons, a few natures 
are central and forever unfold, and these alone charm 
us. He whose word or deed you cannot predict, who 
answers you without any supplication in his eye, 
who draws his determination from within, and 
draws it instantly, — that man rules. 

The staple figure in novels is the man of a^plomh, 
who sits, among the young aspirants and desperates, 
quite sure and compact, and, never sharing their 
affections or debilities, hurls his word like a bullet 
when occasion requires, knows his way, and carries 
his points. They may scream or applaud," he is 
never engaged or heated. ISTapoleon is the type of 
this class in modern history; Byron's heroes in 
poetry. But we, for the most part, are all drawn 
into the charivari ; we chide, lament, cavil, and re- 
criminate. 

I think Hans Andersen's story of the cobweb 
cloth woven so fine that it was invisible, — woven 
/or the king's garment, — must mean manners, which 
do really clothe a princely nature. Such a one 
can well go in a blanket, if he would. In the gym- 
nasium or on the sea-beach his superiority does not 
leave him. But he who has not this fine garment 
of behavior is studious of dress, and then not less of 
house and furniture and pictures and gardens, in all 
which he hopes to lie ;perdu, and not be exposed. 



SOCIAL AIMS. 73 

"Manners are stronger than laws." Their vast 
convenience I must always admire. The perfect 
defence and isolation which they effect makes an 
insuperable protection. Though the person so 
clothed wrestle with you, or swim with you, lodge 
in the same chamber, eat at the same table, he is 
yet a thousand miles off, and can at any moment 
finish with you. Manners seem to say. You are, yoUy 
and I am L In the most delicate natures, fine 
temperament and culture build this impassable 
wall. Balzac finely said : " Kings themselves can- 
not force the exquisite politeness of distance to 
capitulate, hid behind its shield of bronze." 

Nature values manners. See how she has pre- 
pared for them. Who teaches manners of majesty, 
of frankness, of grace, of humility, — who but the 
adoring aunts and cousins that surround a young 
child ? The babe meets such courting and flattery 
as only kings receive when adult ; and, trying ex- 
periments, and at perfect leisure with these pos- 
ture-masters and flatterers all day, he throws him- 
self into all the attitudes that correspond to theirs. 
Are they humble ? he is composed. Are they eager ? 
he is nonchalant. Are they encroaching ? he is 
dignified and inexorable. And this scene is daily 
repeated in hovels as well as in high houses. 

Nature is the best posture-master. An awk- 
ward man is graceful when asleep, or when hard at 
work, or agreeably amused. The attitudes of chil- 

4 



74 SOCIAL AIMS. 

dren are gentle, persuasive, royal, in their games 
and in their house-talk and in the street, before 
they have learned to cringe. T is impossible but 
thought disposes the limbs and the walk, and is 
masterly or secondary. No art can contravene it, or 
conceal it. Give me a thought, and my hands and 
legs and voice and face will all go right. And we 
are awkward for want of thought. The inspiration 
is scanty, and does not arrive at the extremities. 

It is a commonplace of romances to show the 
imgainly manners of the pedant who has lived too 
long in college. Intellectual men pass for vulgar, 
and are timid and heavy with the elegant. But, if 
the elegant are also intellectual, instantly the hesi- 
tating scholar is inspired, transformed, and exhibits 
the best style of manners. An intellectual man, 
though of feeble spirit, is instantly reinforced by 
being put into the company of scholars, and, to 
the surprise of everybody, becomes a lawgiver. 
We think a man unable and desponding. It is 
only that he is misplaced. Put him with new com- 
panions, and they will find in him excellent quali- 
ties, unsuspected accomplishments, and the joy of 
life. 'T is a great point in a gallery, how you hang 
pictures ; and not less in society, how you seat 
your party. The circumstance of circumstance is 
timing and placing. When a man meets his accu- 
rate mate, society begins, and life is delicious. 

What happiness they give, — what ties they 



SOCIAL AIMS. 75 

form ! Whilst one man by his manners pins me 
to the wall, with another I walk among the stars. 
One man can, by his voice, lead the cheer of a 
regiment; another will have no following. Na- 
ture made ns all intelligent of these signs, for our 
safety and our happiness. Whilst certain faces 
are illumined with intelligence, decorated with in- 
vitation, others are marked with warnings : certain 
voices are hoarse and truculent ; sometimes they 
even bark. There is the same difference between 
heavy and genial manners as between the percep- 
tions of octogenarians and those of young girls 
who see everything in the twinkling of an eye. 

Manners are the revealers of secrets, the betrayers 
of any disproportion or want of sjraimetry in mind 
and character. It is the law of our constitution that 
every change in our experience instantly indicates 
itself on our countenance and carriage, as the lapse 
of time tells itself on the face of a clock. We may 
be too obtuse to read it, but the record is there. 
Some men may be obtuse to read it, but some men 
are not obtuse and do read it. InBorrow's ''Laven- 
gro," the gypsy instantly detects, by his companion's 
face and behavior, that some good fortune has be- 
fallen him, and that he has money. We say, in 
these days, that credit is to be abolished in trade : 
is it ? When a stranger comes to buy goods of you, 
do you not look in his face and answer according to 
what you read there ? Credit is to be abolished ? 



76 SOCIAL AIMS. 

Can't yoTi abolisli faces and character, of which credit 
is the reflection ? As long as men are born babes 
they will live on credit for the first fourteen or eigh- 
teen years of their life. Every innocent man has in 
his countenance a promise to pay, and hence credit. 
Less credit will there be ? You are mistaken. There 
will always be more and more. Character must be 
trusted ; and, just in proportion to the morality of 
a people, will be the expansion of the credit system. 

There is even a little rule of prudence for the 
young experimenter which Dr. Franklin omitted to 
set down, yet which the youth may find useful, — 
Do not go to ask your debtor the payment of a 
debt on the day when you have no other resource. 
He will learn by your air and tone how it is with 
you, and will treat you as a beggar. But work 
and starve a little longer. Wait till your affairs 
go better, and you have other means at hand ; you 
will then ask in a different tone, and he will treat 
your claim with entire respect. 

]N"ow, we all wish to be graceful, and do justice to 
ourselves by our manners ; but youth in America is 
wont to be poor and hurried, not at ease, or not in 
society where high behavior could be taught. But 
the sentiment of honor and the wish to serve make 
all our pains superfluous. Life is not so short but 
that there is always time enough for courtesy. 
Self-command is the main elegance. "Keep cool, 
and you command everybody," said St. Just ; and 



SOCIAL AIMS. 77 

the wily old Talleyrand would still say, Surtouty 
messieurs, ;pas de zele, — " Above all, gentlemen, no 
heat." 

Why have you statues in your hall, but to teach 
you that, when the door-bell rings, you shall sit 
like them. " Eat at your table as you would eat 
at the table of the king," said Confucius. It is an 
excellent custom of the Quakers, if only for a 
school of manners, — the silent prayer before meals. 
It has the effect to stop mirth, and introduce a 
moment of reflection. After the pause, all resume 
their usual intercourse from a •vantage-ground. 
What a check to the violent manners which some- 
times come to the table, — of wrath, and whin- 
ing, and heat in trifles ! 

'T is a rule of manners to avoid exaggeration. A 
lady loses as soon as she admires too easily and too 
much. In man or woman, the face and the person 
lose power when they are on the strain to express 
admiration. A man makes his inferiors his superi- 
ors by heat. Why need you, who are not a gossip, 
talk as a gossip, and tell eagerly what the neighbors 
or the journals say? State your opinion without 
apology. The attitude is the main point, assuring 
your companion that, come good news or come bad, 
you remain in good heart and good mind, which 
is the best news you can possibly communicate. 
Self-control is the rule. You have in you there a 
noisy, sensual savage which you are to keep down. 



78 SOCIAL AIMS. 

and turn all Ms strength to beauty. For example, 
what a seneschal and detective is laughter! It 
seems to require several generations of education 
to train a squeaking or a shouting habit out of a 
man. Sometimes, when in almost all expressions 
the Choctaw and the slave have been worked out 
of him, a coarse nature still betrays itself in his 
contemptible squeals of joy. It is necessary for the 
purification of drawing-rooms, that these entertain- 
ing explosions should be under strict control. Lord 
Chesterfield had early made this discovery, for he 
says, " I am sure that since I had the use of my 
reason, no human being has ever heard me laugh." 
I know that there go two to this game, and, in the 
presence of certain formidable wits, savage nature 
must sometimes rush out in some disorder. 

To pass to an allied topic, one word or two in 
regard to dress, in which our civilization instantly 
shows itself No nation is dressed with more good 
sense than ours. And everybody sees certain moral 
benefit in it. When the young European emigrant, 
after a summer's labor, puts on for lihe first time a 
new coat, he puts on much more. His good and 
becoming clothes put him on thinking that he must 
behave like people who are so dressed ; and silently 
and steadily his behavior mends. But quite another 
class of our own youth, I should remind, of dress 
in general, that some people need it, and others 
need it not. Thus a kinsr or a general does not need 



SOCIAL AIMS. 79 

a fine coat, and a commanding person may save 
himself all solicitude on that point. There are al- 
ways slovens in State Street or Wall Street, who 
are not less considered. If a man have manners 
and talent he may dress roughly and carelessly. 
It is only when mind and character slumber that 
the dress can be seen. If the intellect were always 
awake, and every noble sentiment, the man might 
go in huckaback or mats, and his dress would be 
admired and imitated. Eemember George Her- 
bert's maxim, " This coat with my discretion will be 
brave." If, however, a man has not firm nerves, 
and has keen sensibility, it is perhaps a wise econ- 
omy to go to a good shop and dress himself irre- 
proachably. He can then dismiss all care from his 
mind, and may easily find that performance an ad- 
dition of confidence, a fortification that turns the 
scale in social encounters, and allows him to go 
gayly into conversations where else he had been 
dry and embarrassed. I am not ignorant, — I have 
heard with admiring submission the experience of 
the lady who declared "that the sense of being 
perfectly well-dressed gives a feeling of inward 
tranquillity which religion is powerless to bestow." 
Thus much for manners : but we are not content 
with pantomime ; we say, this is only for the eyes. 
We want real relations of the mind and the heart ; 
we want friendship ; we want knowledge ; we want 
virtue ; a more inward existence to read the history 



80 SOCIAL AIMS. 

of each other. Welfare requires one or two com- 
panions of intelligence, probity, and grace, to wear 
out life with, — persons with whom we can speak a 
few reasonable words every day, by whom we can 
measure ourselves, and who shall hold us fast to 
good sense and virtue ; and these we are always in 
search of He must be inestimable to us to whom 
we can say what we cannot say to ourselves. Yet 
now and then we say things to our mates, or hear 
things from them, which seem to put it out of the 
power of the parties to be strangers again. "Either 
death or a friend," is a Persian proverb. I sup- 
pose I give the experience of many when I give 
my own. A few times in my life it has hap- 
pened to me to meet persons of so good a nature 
and so good breeding, that every topic was open and 
discussed without possibility of offence, — persons 
who could not be shocked. One of my friends said 
in speaking of certain associates, " There is not one 
of them but I can offend at any moment." But to 
the company I am now considering, were no terrors, 
no vulgarity. All topics were broached, — life, love, 
marriage, sex, hatred, suicide, magic, theism, art, 
poetry, religion, myself, thyself, all selves, and what- 
ever else, with a security and vivacity which belonged 
to the nobility of the parties and to their brave 
truth. The life of these persons was conducted in 
the same calm and affirmative manner as their dis- 
course. Life with them was an experiment contin- 



SOCIAL AIMS. 81 

ually varied, full of results, full of grandeur, and by 
no means the hot and hurried business which passes 
in the world. The delight in good company, in pure, 
brilliant, social atmosphere ; the incomparable sat- 
isfaction of a society in which everything can be 
safely said, in which every member returns a true 
echo, in which a wise freedom, an ideal republic of 
sense, simplicity, knowledge, and thorough good- 
meaning abide, — doubles the value of life. It is 
this that justifies to each the jealousy with which 
the doors are kept. Do not look sourly at the set 
or the club which does not choose you. Every 
highly organized person knows the value of the so- 
cial barriers, since the best society has often been 
spoiled to him by the intrusion of bad companions. 
He of all men would keep the right of choice sacred, 
and feel that the exclusions are in the interest of 
the admissions, though they happen at this moment 
to thwart his wishes. 

The hunger for company is keen, but it must be 
discriminating, and must be economized. 'T is a 
defect in our manners that they have not yet reached 
the prescribing a limit to visits. That every well- 
dressed lady or gentleman should be at liberty to 
exceed ten minutes in his or her call on serious 
people, shows a civilization still rude. A universal 
etiquette should fix an iron limit after which a mo- 
ment should not be allowed without explicit leave 
granted on request of either the giver or receiver 

4* F 



82 SOCIAL AIMS. 

of the visit. There is inconvenience in such strict- 
ness, but vast inconvenience in the want of it. To 
trespass on a public servant is to trespass on a 
nation's time. Yet presidents of the United States 
are afflicted by rude Western and Southern gossips 
(I hope it is only by them) until the gossip's im- 
measurable legs are tired of sitting ; then he strides 
out and the nation is relieved. 

It is very certain that sincere and happy conver- 
sation doubles our powers ; that, in the effort to un- 
fold our thought to a friend, we make it clearer to 
ourselves, and surround it with illustrations that 
help and delight us. It may happen that each hears 
from the other a better wisdom than any one else 
wiU ever hear from either. But these ties are taken 
care of by Providence to each of us. A wise man 
once said to me that " all whom he knew, met " : — 
meaning that he need not take pains to introduce 
the persons whom he valued to each other: they 
were sure to be drawn together as by gravitation. 
The soul of a man must be the servant of another. 
The true friend must have an attraction to whatever 
virtue is in us. Our chief want in life, — is it not 
somebody who can make us do what we can ? And 
we are easily great with the loved and honored as- 
sociate. We come out of our eggshell existence 
and see the great dome arching over us ; see the 
zenith above and the nadir under us. 

Speech is power : speech is to persuade, to con- 



SOCIAL AIMS. 83 

vert, to compel. It is to bring another out of Ms 
bad sense into your good sense. You are to be 
missionary and carrier of all that is good and noble. 
Virtues speak to virtues, vices, to vices, — each to 
their own kind in the people with whom we deal. 
If you are suspiciously and dryly on your guard, so 
is he or she. If you rise to frankness and generosity, 
they will respect it now or later. 

In this art of conversation, Woman, if not the 
queen and victor, is the lawgiver. If every one 
recalled his experiences, he might find the best in 
the speech of superior women, — which was better 
than song, and carried ingenuity, character, wise 
counsel, and affection, as easily as the wit with 
which it was adorned. They are not only wise 
themselves, they make us wise. No one can be a 
master in conversation who has not learned much 
from women; their presence and inspiration are 
essential to its success. Steele said of his mistress, 
that "to have loved her was a liberal education." 
Shenstone gave no bad account of this influence in 
his description of the French woman : " There is a 
quality in which no woman in the world can com- 
pete with her, — it is the power of intellectual irri- 
tation. She will draw wit out of a fool. She 
strikes with such address the chords of seK-love, 
that she gives unexpected vigor and agility to 
fancy, and electrifies a body that appeared non- 
electric." Coleridge esteems cultivated women a^ 



84 SOCIAL AIMS. 

the depositaries and guardians of "English nnde- 
filed " ; and Luther commends that accomplishment 
of " pure German speech " of his wife. 

Madame de Stael, by the unanimous consent of 
all who knew her, was the most extraordinary con- 
verser that was known in her time, and it was a 
time full of eminent men and women ; she knew all 
distinguished persons in letters or society, in Eng- 
land, Germany, and Italy, as well as in France, 
though she said, with characteristic nationality> 
" Conversation, like talent, exists only in France." 
Madame de Stael valued nothing but conversation. 
When they showed her the beautiful Lake Leman, 
she exclaimed, " for the gutter of the Kue de 
Bac 1 " the street in Paris in which her house stood. 
And she said one day, seriously, to M. Mole, " If it 
were not for respect to human opinions, I would not 
open my window to see the Bay of Naples for the 
first time, whilst I would go five hundred leagues to 
talk with a man of genius whom I had not seen." 
Ste. Beuve tells us of the privileged circle at Coppet, 
that, after making an excursion one day, the party 
returned in two coaches from Chambery to Aix, on 
the way to Coppet. The first coach had many rue- 
ful accidents to relate, — a terrific thunder-storm, 
shocking roads, and danger and gloom to the whole 
company. The party in the second coach, on arriv- 
ing, heard this story with surprise ; — of thunder- 
storm, of steeps, of mud, of danger, they knew noth- 



SOCIAL AIMS. 85 

ing; no, they had forgotten earth, and breathed a 
purer air : such a conversation between Madame de 
Stael and Madame Eecamier and Benjamin Constant 
and Schlegel ! they were all in a state of delight. 
The intoxication of the conversation had made them 
insensible to all notice of weather or rough roads. 
Madame de Tesse said, " If I were Queen, I should 
command Madame de Stael to talk to me every 
day." Conversation fills all gaps, supplies all defi- 
ciencies. What a good trait is that recorded of 
Madame de Maintenon, -that, during dinner, the 
servant slipped to her side, " Please, madame, one 
anecdote more, for there is no roast to-day." 

Politics, war, party, luxury, avarice, fashion, are 
all asses with loaded panniers to serve the kitchen 
of Intellect, the king. There is nothing that does 
not pass into lever or weapon. 

And yet there are trials enough of nerve and char- 
acter, brave choices enough of taking the part of 
truth and of the oppressed against the oppressor, in 
privatest circles. A right speech is not weU to be 
distinguished from action. Courage to ask ques- 
tions ; courage to expose our ignorance. The great 
gain is, not to shine, not to conquer your companion, 
— then you learn nothing but conceit, — but to find 
a companion who knows what you do not ; to tilt 
with him and be overthrown, horse and foot, with 
utter destruction of all your logic and learning. 
There is a defeat that is useful. Then you can see 



86 SOCIAL AIMS. 

the real and the counterfeit, and will never accept 
the counterfeit again. You will adopt the art of 
war that has defeated you. You wiU ride to bat- 
tle horsed on the very logic which you found irre- 
sistible. You will accept the fertile truth, instead 
of the solemn customary lie.' 

Let nature bear the expense. The attitude, the 
tone, is all. Let our eyes not look away, but meet. 
Let us not look east and west for materials of con- 
versation, but rest in presence and unity. A just 
feeling will fast enough supply fuel for discourse, 
if speaking be more grateful than silence. "When 
people come to see us, we foolishly prattle, lest we 
be inhospitable. But things said for conversation 
are chalk eggs. Don't say things. What you are 
stands over you the while, and thunders so that I 
cannot hear what you say to the contrary. A lady 
of my acquaintance said, " I don't care so much for 
what they say as I do for what makes them say it." 

The main point is to throw yourself on the truth, 
and say with [N'ewton, "There 's no contending 
against facts." When Molyneux fancied that the 
observations of the nutation of the earth's axis de- 
stroyed Newton's theory of gravitation, he tried to 
break it softly to Sir Isaac, who only answered, 
" It may be so ; there 's no arguing against facts 
and experiments." 

But there are people who cannot be cultivated, 
— people on whom speech makes no impression, 



SOCIAL AIMS. 87 

— swainish, morose people, who must be kept 
down and quieted as you would those who are a 
little- tipsy ; others, who are not only swainish, but 
are prompt to take oath that swainishness is the 
only culture ; and though their odd wit may have 
some salt for you, your friends would not relish 
it. Bolt these out. And I have seen a man of 
genius who made me think that if other men were 
like him co-operation were impossible. Must we 
always talk for victory, and never once for truth, 
for comfort, and joy? Here is centrality and 
penetration, strong understanding, and the higher 
gifts, the insight of the real, or from the real, and 
the moral rectitude which belongs to it: but all 
this and all his resources of wit and invention are 
lost to me in every experiment that I make to 
hold intercourse with his mind; always some 
weary, captions paradox to fight ypu with, and the 
time and temper wasted. And beware of jokes ; 
too much temperance cannot be used : inestimable 
for sauce, but corrupting for food: we go away, 
hollow and ashamed. As soon as the company 
give in to this enjoyment, we shall have no Olym- 
pus. True wit never made us laugh. Mahomet 
seems to have borrowed by anticipation of several 
centuries a leaf from the mind of Swedenborg, when 
he wrote in the Koran : — 

" On the day of resurrection, those who have indulged 
in ridicule will be called to the door of Paradise, and 



88 SOCIAL AIMS. 

have it shut in their faces when they reach it. Again, 
on their turning back, they will be called to another 
door, and again, on reaching it, will see it closed against 
them ; and so on, ad infinitum, without end." 

Shun the negative side. Never worry people 
with your contritions, nor with dismal views of 
politics or society. Never name sickness ; even if 
you could trust yourself on that perilous topic, 
beware of unmuzzling a valetudinarian, who will 
soon give you your fill of it. 

The law of the table is Beauty, — a respect to 
the common soul of all the guests. Everything 
is unseasonable which is private to two or three 
or any portion of the company. Tact never vio- 
lates for a moment this law; never intrudes the 
orders of the house, the vices of the absent, or a 
tariff of expenses, or professional privacies; as we 
say, we never " talk shop " before company. Lov- 
ers* abstain from caresses, and haters from insults, 
whilst they sit in one parlor with common friends. 
' Stay at home in your mind. Don't recite other 
people's opinions. See how it lies there in you; 
and if there is no counsel, offer none. What we 
want is, not your activity or interference with your 
mind, but your content to be a vehicle of the sim- 
ple truth. The way to have large occasional views, 
as in a political or social crisis, is to have large 
habitual views. When men consult you, it is not 
that they wish you to stand tiptoe, and pump your 



SOCIAL AIMS. 89 

brains, but to apply your habitual view, your wis- 
dom, to the present question, forbearing all pedan- 
tries, and the very name of argument ; for in good 
conversation parties don't speak to the words, but 
to the meanings of each other. 

Manners first, then conversation. Later, we see 
that, as life was not in manners, so it is not in 
talk. Manners are external; talk is occasional: 
these require certain material conditions, human 
labor for food, clothes, house, tools, and, in short, 
plenty and ease, — since only so can certain finer 
and finest powers appear and expand. In a whole 
nation of Hottentots there shall not be one valuable 
man, — valuable out of his tribe. In every million 
of Europeans or of Americans there shall be thou- 
sands who would be valuable on any spot on the 
globe. 

The consideration the rich possess in all societies 
is not without meaning or right. It is the approval 
given by the human understanding to the act of 
creating value by knowledge and labor. It is the 
sense of every human being, that man should have 
this dominion of nature, should arm himself with 
tools, and force the elements to drudge for him and 
give him power. Every one must seek to secure 
his independence; but he need not be rich. The 
old Confucius in China admitted the benefit, but 
stated the limitation : "If the search for riches were 
sure to be successful, though I should become a 



90 SOCIAL AIMS. 

groom with whip in hand to get them, I will do so. 
As the search may not be successful, I wiU follow 
after that which I love." There is in America a 
general conviction in the minds of all mature men, 
that every young man of good faculty and good 
habits can by perseverance attain, to an adequate 
estate ; if he have a turn for business, and a quick 
eye for the opportunities which are always offering 
for investment, he can come to wealth, and in such 
good season as to enjoy as weU as transmit it. 

Every human society wants to be of&cered by a 
best class, who shall be masters instructed in all 
the great arts of life; shall be wise, temperate, 
brave, public men, adorned with dignity and accom- 
plishments. Every country wishes this, and each 
has taken its own method to secure such service to 
the state. In Europe, ancient and modern, it has 
been attempted to secure the existence of a superior 
class by hereditary nobility, with estates transmitted 
by primogeniture and entail. But in the last age, 
this system has been on its trial and the verdict of 
mankind is pretty nearly pronounced. That method 
secured permanence of families, firmness of customs, 
a certain external culture and good taste; grati- 
fied the ear with preserving historic names: but 
the heroic father did not surely have heroic sons, 
and still less surely heroic grandsons ; wealth and 
ease corrupted the race. 

In America, the necessity of clearing the forest. 



SOCIAL AIMS. 91 

laying, out town and street, and building every 
house and barn and fence, then church and town- 
house, exhausted such means as the Pilgrims 
brought, and made the whole population poor; 
and the like necessity is still found in each new 
settlement in the Territories. These needs gave 
their character to the public debates in every vil- 
lage and State. I have been often impressed at our 
country town-meetings with the accumulated viril- 
ity, in each village, of five or six or eight or ten 
men, who speak so well, and so easily handle the 
affairs of the town. I often hear the business of a 
little town (with which I am most familiar) discussed 
with a clearness and thoroughness, and with a gen- 
erosity, too, that would have satisfied me had it 
been in one of the larger capitals. I am sure each 
one of my readers has a parallel experience. And 
every one knows that in every town or city is 
always to be found a certain number of public- 
spirited men, who perform, unpaid, a great amount 
of hard work in the interest of the churches, of 
schools, of public grounds, works of taste and refine- 
ment. And as in civil duties, so in social power 
and duties. Our gentlemen of the old school, that 
is, of the school of Washington, Adams, and Hamil- 
ton, were bred after English types, and that style 
of breeding furnished fine examples in the last gen- 
eration ; but, though some of us have seen such, I 
doubt they are all gone. But nature is not poorer 



92 SOCIAL AIMS. 

to-day. With all our haste, and slipshod ways, and 
flippant self-assertion, I have seen examples of new 
grace and power in address that honor the country. 
It was my fortune not long ago, with my eyes di- 
rected on this subject, to fall in with an American 
to be proud of. I said never was such force, good 
meaning, good sense, good action, combined with 
such domestic lovely behavior, such modesty and 
persistent preference for others. Wherever he 
moved he was the benefactor. It is of course that 
he should ride well, shoot well, sail well, keep house 
well, administer affairs well, but he was the best 
talker, also, in the company: what with a per- 
petual practical wisdom, with an eye always to the 
working of the thing, what with the multitude and 
distinction of his facts (and one detected continu- 
ally that he had a hand in everything that has 
been done), and in the temperance with which he 
parried all offence, and opened the eyes of the per- 
son he talked with without contradicting him. Yet 
I said to myself. How little this man suspects, with 
his sympathy for men and his respect for lettered 
and scientific people, that he is not likely, in any 
company, to meet a man superior to himself. And 
I think this is a good country, that can bear such a 
creature as he is. 

The young men in America at this moment take 
little thought of what men in England are thinking 
or doing. That is the point which decides the wel- 



SOCIAL AIMS." 93 

fare of a people ; which way does it look ? If to any 
other people, it is not well with them. If occu- 
pied in its own affairs and thoughts and men, with 
a heat which excludes almost the notice of any 
other people, — as the Jews,, the Greeks, the Per- 
sians, the Eomans, the Arabians, the French, the 
English, at their best times have done, — they are 
sublime ; and we know that in this abstraction 
they are executing excellent work. Amidst the 
calamities which war has brought on our country 
this one benefit has accrued, — that our eyes are 
withdrawn from England, withdrawn from France, 
and look homeward. We have come to feel that 
" by ourselves our safety must be bought " ; to 
know the vast resources of the continent, the good- 
will that is in the people, their conviction of the 
great moral advantages of freedom, social equality, 
education, and religious culture, and their determi- 
nation to hold these fast, and, by them, to hold fast 
the country and penetrate every square mile of it 
with this American civilization. 

The consolation and happy moment of life, aton- 
ing for aU short- comings, is sentiment ; a flame of 
affection or delight in the heart, burning up sudden- 
ly for its object, — as the love of the mother for her 
child ; of the child for its mate ; of the youth for 
his friend; of the scholar for his pursuit; of the 
boy for sea-life, or for painting, or in the passion for 
his country ; or in the tender-hearted philanthropist 



94 ' SOCIAL AIMS. 



to spend and be spent for some romantic charity, as 
Howard for tlie prisoner, or John Brown for the 
slave. No matter what the object is, so it be good, 
this flame of desire makes life sweet and tolerable. 
It reinforces the heart that feels it, makes all its acts 
and words gracious and interesting. Now society in 
towns is infested by persons who, seeing that the 
sentiments please, counterfeit the expression of them. 
These we call sentimentalists, — talkers who mis- 
take the description for the thing, saying for having. 
They have, they tell you, an intense love of nature ; 
poetry, — 0, they adore poetry, and roses, and the 
moon, and the cavalry regiment, and the governor ; 
they love liberty, " dear liberty ! " they worship 
virtue, " dear virtue ! " Yes, they adopt whatever 
merit is in good repute, and almost make it hateful 
with their praise. The warmer their expressions, 
the colder we feel ; we shiver with cold, A little 
experience acquaints us with the unconvertibility 
of the sentimentalist, the soul that is lost by mim- 
icking soul. Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, 
mollify the homicide, civilize the Pawnee, but what 
lessons can be devised for the debauchee of senti- 
ment ? Was ever one converted ? The innocence 
and ignorance of the patient is the first dif&culty : 
he believes his disease is blooming health. A rough 
realist, or a phalanx of realists, would be prescribed ; 
but that is like proposing to mend your bad road 
with diamonds. Then poverty, famine, war, im- 






SOCIAL AIMS. 95 

prisonment, miglat be tried. Another cure would 
be to fight fire with fire, to match a sentimentalist 
with a sentimentalist. I think each might begin to 
suspect that something was wrong. 

Would we codify the laws that should reign in 
households, and whose daily transgression annoys 
and mortifies us, and degrades our household life 
— we must learn to adorn every day with sacrifices. 
Good manners are made up of petty sacrifices. 
Temperance, courage, love, are made up of the same 
jewels. Listen to every prompting of honor. " As 
soon as sacrifice becomes a duty and necessity to 
the man, I see no limit to the horizon which opens 
before me." * 

Of course those people, and no athers, interest us 
who believe in their thought, who are absorbed, if 
you please to say so, in their own dream. They 
only can give the key and leading to better society : 
those who delight in each other only because both 
delight in the eternal laws ; who forgive nothing to 
each other ; who, by their joy and homage to these, 
are made incapable of conceit, which destroys al- 
most all the fine wits. Any other affection between 
men than this geometric one of relation to the same 
thing, is a mere mush of materialism. 

These are the bases of civil and polite society ; 
namely, manners, conversation, lucrative labor, and 
public action, whether political, or in the leading of 

* Ernest Renan. 



96 SOCIAL AIMS. 

social institutions. We liave mucli to regret, mncli 
to mend, in our society ; but I believe that with all 
liberal and hopeful men there is a firm faith in the 
beneficent results which we really enjoy ; that in- 
telligence, manly enterprise, good education, virtu- 
ous life, and elegant manners have been and are 
found here, and, we hope, in the next generation 
wiU still more abound. 



ELOQUENCE. 



I 



ELOQUENCE. 

I DO not know any kind of history, except the 
event of a battle, to which people listen with more 
interest than to any anecdote of eloquence; and the 
wise think it better than a battle. It is a triumph 
of pure power, and it has a beautiful and prodigious 
surprise in it. For all can see and understand the 
means by which a battle is gained : they count 
the armies, they see the cannon, the musketry, the 
cavalry, and the character and advantages of the 
ground, so that the result is often predicted by 
the observer with great certainty before the charge 
is sounded. Not so in a court of law, or in a legis- 
lature. Who knows before the.debate begins what 
the preparation, or what the means are of the com- 
batants ? The facts, the reasons, the logic, — above 
all, the flame of passion and the continuous energy 
of will which is presently to be let loose on this 
bench of judges, or on this miscellaneous assembly 
gathered from the streets, — are all invisible and 
unknown. Indeed, much power is to be exhibited 



100 ELOQUENCE. 

which is not yet called into existence, but is to be 
suggested on the spot by the unexpected turn things 
may take, — at the appearance of new evidence, or 
by the exhibition of an unlooked-for bias in the 
judges, or in the audience. It is eminently the art 
which only flourishes in free countries. It is an old 
proverb, that " Every people has its prophet " ; and 
every class of the people has. Our community runs 
through a long scale of mental power, from the 
highest refinement to the borders of savage igno- 
rance and rudeness. There are not only the wants 
of the intellectual and learned and poetic men and 
women to be met, but also the vast interests of 
property, public and private, of mining, of manufac- 
tures, of trade, of railroads, etc. These must have 
their advocates of each improvement and each in- 
terest. Then the political questions, which agitate 
millions, find or form a class of men by nature and 
habit fit to discuss and deal with these measures, 
and make them intelligible and acceptable to the 
electors. So of education, of art, of philanthropy. 
Eloquence shows the power and possibility of 
man. There is one of whom we took no note, but 
on a certain occasion it appears that he has a secret 
virtue never suspected, — that he can paint what 
has occurred, and what must occur, with such clear- 
ness to a company, as if they saw it done before 
their eyes. By leading their thought he leads their 
will, and can make them do gladly what an hour 



ELOQUENCE. 101 

ago they would not believe that they could be led 
to do at aU : he makes them glad or angry or peni- 
tent at his pleasure ; of enemies makes friends, and 
fills desponding men with hope and joy. After 
Sheridan's speech in the trial of Warren Hastings, 
Mr. Pitt moved an adjournment, that the House 
might recover from the overpowering effect of 
Sheridan's oratory. Then recall the delight that 
sudden eloquence gives, — the surprise that the 
moment is so rich. The orator is the physician. 
Whether he speaks in the Capitol or on a cart, he 
is the benefactor that lifts men above themselves, 
and creates a higher appetite than he satisfies. The 
orator is he whom every man is seeking when he goes 
into the courts, into the conventions, into any popu- 
lar assembly, — though often disappointed, yet never 
giving over the hope. He finds himself perhaps in 
the Senate, when the forest has cast out some wild, 
black-browed bantling to show the same energy 
in the crowd of officials which he had learned in 
driving cattle to the hills, or in scrambling through 
thickets in a winter forest, or through the swamp 
and river for his game. In the folds of his brow, 
in the majesty of his mien, Nature has marked her 
son ; and in tliat artificial and perhaps unworthy 
place and company shall remind you of the lessons 
taught him in earlier days by the torrent in the 
gloom of the pine-woods, when he was the com- 
panion of the mountain cattle, of jays and foxes, 



102 ELOQUENCE. 

and a hunter of the bear. Or you may find him in 
some lowly Bethel, by the seaside, where a hard- 
featured, scarred, and -wrinkled Methodist becomes 
the poet of the sailor and the fisherman, whilst 
he pours out the abundant streams of his thought 
through a language all glittering and fiery with 
imagination, — a man who never knew the looking- 
glass or the critic, — a man whom college drill or 
patronage never made, and whom praise cannot 
spoil, — a man who conquers his audience by in- 
fusing his soul into them, and speaks by the right 
of being the person in the assembly who has the 
most to say, and so makes all other speakers appear 
little and cowardly before his face. For the time, 
his exceeding life throws all other gifts into shade, 
— philosophy speculating on its own breath, taste, 
learning, and all, — and yet how every listener 
gladly consents to be nothing in his presence, and 
to share this surprising emanation, and be steeped 
and ennobled in the new wine of this eloquence ! 
It instructs in the power of man over men ; that a 
man is a mover ; to the extent of his being, a power ; 
and, in contrast with the efficiency he suggests, our 
actual life and society appears a dormitory. Who 
can wonder at its influence on young and ardeiit 
minds ? Uncommon boys follow uncommon men ; 
and I think every one of us can remember when 
our first experiences made us for a time the victim 
and worshipper of the fii'st master of this art whom 



ELOQUENCE. 103 

we happened to hear in the court-house or in the 
caucus. We reckon the bar, the senate, journal- 
ism, and the pulpit, peaceful professions ; but you 
cannot escape the demand for courage in these, and 
certainly there is no true orator who is not a hero. 
His attitude in the rostrum, on the platform, re- 
quires that he counterbalance his auditory. He is 
challenger, and must answer all comers. The ora- 
tor must ever stand with forward foot, in the atti- 
tude of advancing. His speech must be just ahead 
of the assembly, — ahead of the whole human race, 
— or it is superfluous. His speech is not to be 
distinguished from action. It is the electricity of 
action. It is action, as the general's word of. com- 
mand, or chart of battle, is action. I must feel that 
the speaker compromises himself to his auditory, 
comes for something, — it is a cry on the perilous 
edge of the fight, — or let him be silent. You go to 
a town-meeting where the people are called to some 
disagreeable duty, — such as, for example, often oc- 
curred during the war, at the occasion of a new 
draft. They come unwillingly : they have spent 
their money once or twice very freely. They have 
sent their best men : the young and ardent, those 
of a martial temper, went at the first draft, or the 
second, and it is not easy to see who else can be 
spared, or can be induced to go. The silence and 
coldness after the meeting is opened, and the pur- 
pose of it stated, are not encouraging. When a good 



104 ELOQUENCE. 

man rises in the cold and malicious assembly, you 
think, "Well, sir, it would be more prudent to bo 
silent ; why not rest, sir, on your good record ? 
Nobody doubts your talent and power ; but for the 
present business, we know all about it, and are tired 
of being pushed into patriotism by people who stay 
at home. But he, taking no counsel of past things, 
but only of the inspiration of his to-day's feeling, 
surprises them with his tidings, with his better 
knowledge, his larger view, his steady gaze at the 
new and future event, whereof they had not thought, 
and they are interested, like so many children, and 
carried off out of all recollection of their malignant 
considerations, and he gains his victory by proph- 
ecy, where they expected repetition. He knew very 
well beforehand that they were looking behind and 
that he was looking ahead, and therefore it was wise 
to speak. Then the observer says, Wliat a godsend 
is this manner of man to a town ! and he, what a 
faculty ! He is put together like a Waltham watch, 
or like a locomotive just finished at the Tredegar 
works. 

!N"o act indicates more universal health than elo- 
quence. The special ingredients of this force are : 
clear perceptions ; memory ; power of statement ; 
logic ; imagination, or the skill to clothe your 
thought in natural images ; passion, which is the 
heat ; and then a grand will, which, when legitimate 
and abiding, we call character, the height of man- 



ELOQUENCE. 105 

hood. As soon as a man shows rare power of ex- 
pression, like Chatham, Erskine, Patrick Henry, 
Webster, or Phillips, all the great interests, whether 
of state or of property, crowd to him to be their 
spokesman, so that he is at once a potentate, a ruler 
of men. A worthy gentleman, Mr. Alexander, lis- 
tening to the debates of the General Assembly of 
the Scottish Kirk, in Edinburgh, and eager to speak 
to the questions, but utterly failing in his endeavors, 
— delighted with the talent shown by Dr. Hugh 
Blair, went to him, and offered him one thousand 
pounds sterling if he would teach him to speak 
with propriety in public. If the performance of 
the advocate reaches any high success, it is paid 
in England with dignities in the professions, and 
in the state with seats in the cabinet, earldoms, 
and woolsacks. And it is easy to see that the 
great and daily growing interests at stake in this 
country must pay proportional prices to their 
spokesmen and defenders. It does not surprise 
us, then, to learn from Plutarch what great sums 
were paid at Athens to the teachers of rhetoric; 
and if the pupils got what they paid for, the les- 
sons were cheap. 

But this' power which so fascinates and astonishes 
and commands is only the exaggeration of a talent 
which is universal. All men are competitors in this 
art. We have aU attended meetings called for some 
object in which no one had beforehand any warm 

5* 



106 ELOQUENCE. 

interest. Every speaker rose unwillingly, and even 
his speech was a bad excuse ; but it is only the first 
plunge which is formidable, and deep interest or 
sympathy thaws the ice, loosens the tongue, and will 
carry the cold and fearful presently into seK-posses- 
sion, and possession of the audience. Oo into an as- 
sembly well excited, some angry political meeting on 
the eve of a crisis. Then it appears that eloquence 
is as natural as swimming, — an art which all men 
might learn, though so few do. It only needs that 
they should be once well pushed off into the water, 
overhead, without corks, and, after a mad strug- 
gle or two, they find their poise and the use of their 
arms, and henceforward they possess this new and 
wonderful element. 

The most hard-fisted, disagreeably restless, thought- 
paralyzing companion sometimes turns out in a 
public assembly to be a fluent, various, and effec- 
tive orator. Now you find what all that excess of 
power which so chafed and fretted you in a tete-ci- 
tete with him was for. What is peculiar in it is 
a certain creative heat, which a man attains to 
perhaps only once in his life. Those whom we 
admire — the great orators — have some hahit of 
heat, and, moreover, a certain control of it, an art 
of husbanding it, — as if their hand was on the 
organ-stop, and could now use it temperately, and 
now let out all the length and breadth of the 
power. I Temember that Jenny Lind, when in this 



ELOQUENCE. 107 

country, complained of concert-rooms and town-halls, 
that they did not give her room enough to unroll 
her voice, and exulted in the opportunity given her 
in the great halls she found sometimes built over a 
railroad depot. And this is quite as true of the 
action of the mind itself, that a man of this talent 
sometimes finds himself cold and slow in private 
company, and perhaps a heavy companion ; but give 
him a commanding occasion, and the inspiration of 
a great multitude, and he surprises by new and un- 
looked-for powers. Before, he was out of place, and 
unfitted as a cannon in a parlor. To be sure there 
are physical advantages, — some eminently leading 
to this art. I mentioned Jenny Lind's voice. A 
good voice has a charm in speech as in song ; some- 
times of itself enchains attention, and indicates a 
rare sensibility, especially when trained to wield all 
its powers. The voice, like the face, betrays the 
nature and disposition, and soon indicates what is 
the range of the speaker's mind. Many people 
have no ear for music, but every one has an ear for 
skilful reading. Every one of us has at some time 
been the victim of a well-toned and cunning voice, 
and perhaps been repelled once for all by a harsh, 
mechanical speaker. The voice, indeed, is a deli- 
cate index of the state of mind. I have heard 
an eminent preacher say, that he learns from 
the first tones of his voice on a Sunday morning 
whether he is to have a successful day. A singer 



108 ELOQUENCE. 

cares little for the words of the song ; he will make 
any words glorious. I think the Kke rule holds of 
the good reader. In the church I call him only a 
good reader who can read sense and poetry into any 
hymn in the hymn-book. Plutarch, in his enumera- 
tion of the ten Greek orators, is careful to mention 
their excellent voices, and the pains bestowed by 
spme of them in training these. What character, 
what infinite variety, belong to the voice ! sometimes 
it is a flute, sometimes a trip-hammer ; what range 
of force ! In moments of clearer thought or deeper 
sympathy, the voice will attain a music and pene- 
tration which surprises the speaker as much as the 
auditor ; he also is a sharer of the higher wind that 
blows over his strings. I believe that some orators 
go to the assembly as to a closet where to find their 
best thoughts. The Persian poet Saadi tells us that 
a person with a disagreeable voice was reading the 
Koran aloud, when a holy man, passing by, asked 
what was his monthly stipend. He answered, 
" Nothing at all." " But why then do you take so 
much trouble ? " He replied, "I read for the sake 
of God." The other rejoined, " For God's sake, do 
not read ; for if you read the Koran in this manner 
you will destroy the splendor of Islamism." Then 
there are persons of natural fascination, with certain 
frankness, winning manners, almost endearments in 
their style ; like Bouillon, who could almost per- 
suade you that a quartan ague was wholesome ; like 



ELOQUENCE. 109 

Louis XL of France, whom Commines praises for 
"the gift of managing all minds by his accent 
and the caresses of his speech " j like Galiani, Vol- 
taire, Eobert Burns, Barclay, Fox, and Henry Clay. 
What must have been the discourse of St. Bernard, 
when mothers hid their sons, wives their husbands, 
companions their friends, lest they should be led by 
his eloquence to join the monastery. ^ 

It is said that one of. the best readers in his time 
was the late President John Quincy Adams. I 
have heard that no man could read the Bible with 
such powerful effect. I can easily believe it, though 
I never heard him speak in public until his fine 
voice was much broken by age. But the wonders 
he could achieve with that cracked and disobedient 
organ showed what power might have belonged to 
it in early manhood. If " indignation makes good 
verses," as Horace says, it is not less true that a 
good indignation makes an excellent speech. In 
the early years of this century, Mr. Adams, at that 
time a member of the United States Senate at 
Washington, was elected Professor of Ehetoric and 
Oratory in Harvard College. When he read his 
first lectures in 1806, not only the students heard 
him with delight, but the hall was crowded by the 
Professors and by unusual visitors. I remember 
when, long after, I entered college, hearing the 
story of the numbers of coaches in which his friends 
came from Boston to hear him. On his return in 



110 ELOQUENCE. 

the winter to the Senate at Washington, he took 
such ground in the debates of the following session 
as to lose the sympathy of many of his constituents 
in Boston. When, on his return from Washington, 
he resumed his lectures in Cambridge, his class at- 
tended, but the coaches from Boston did not come, 
and, indeed, many of his political friends deserted 
him. In 1809 he was appointed Minister to Eussia, 
and resigned his chair in the University. His last 
lecture, in taking leave of his class, contained some 
nervous allusions to the treatment he had received 
from his old friends, which showed how much it 
had stung him, and which made a profound impres- 
sion on the class. Here is the concluding para- 
graph, which long resounded in Cambridge : — 

" At no hour of your Hfe will the love of letters ever 
oppress you as a burden, or fail you as a resource. In 
the vain and foolish exultation of the heart, which the 
brighter prospects of hfe will sometimes excite, the pen- 
sive portress of Science shall call you to the sober pleas- 
ures of her holy cell. In the mortifications of disap- 
pointment, her soothing voice shall whisper serenity and 
peace. In social converse with the mighty dead of 
ancient days, you will never smart under the galling 
sense of dependence upon the mighty living of the 
present age. And ' in your struggles with the world, 
should a crisis ever occur, when even friendship may 
deem it prudent to desert you, when even your country 
may seem ready to abandon herself and you, when 



ELOQUENCE. Ill 

priest and Levite shall come and look on you and pass 
by on the other side, seek refuge, my mdailing friends, 
and be assured you shall fifid it, in the friendship of 
Lselius and Scipio, in the patriotism of Cicero, Demos- 
thenes, and Burke, as well as in the precepts and example 
of Him whose law is love, and who taught us to remem- 
ber injuries only to forgive them." 

The orator must command the whole scale of the 
language, from the most elegant to the most low and 
vile. Every one has felt how superior in force is 
the language of the street to that of the academy. 
The street must be one of his schools. Ought not 
the scholar to be able to convey his meaning in 
terms as short and strong as the porter or truck- 
man uses to convey his ? And Lord Chesterfield 
thought " that without being instructed in the dia- 
lect of the Hcdles no man could be a complete mas- 
ter of French." The speech of the man in the street 
is invariably strong, nor can you mend it by making 
it what you call parliamentary. You say, "if he 
could only express himself"; but he does already 
better than any one can for him, — can always get 
the ear of an audience to the exclusion of everybody 
else. Well, this is an example in point. That some- , 
thing which each man was created to say and do, he 
only or he best can tell you, and has a right to 
supreme attention so far. The power of their speech 
is, that it is perfectly understood by all ; and I be- 
lieve it to be true, that when any orator at the bar 



112 ELOQUENCE. 

or in tlie Senate rises in his thonglit, he descends in 
his language, — that is, when he rises to any height 
of thought or of passion he conies down to a lan- 
guage level with the ear of all his audience. It is 
the merit of John Brown and of Abraham Lincoln - — 
one at Charlestown, one at Gettysburg — in the two 
best specimens of eloquence we have had in this 
country. And observe that all poetry is written in 
the oldest and simplest English words. Dr. John- 
son said, " There is in fevery nation a style which 
never becomes obsolete, a certain mode of phraseol- 
ogy so consonant to the analogy and principles of 
its respective language as to remain, settled and 
unaltered. This style is to be sought in the com- 
mon intercourse of life among those who speak only 
to be understood, without ambition of elegance. The 
polite are always catching modish innovations, and 
the learned forsake the vulgar, when the vulgar is 
right ; but there is a conversation above grossness 
and below refinement, where propriety resides." 

But all these are the gymnastics, the education of 
eloquence, and not itself They cannot be too much 
considered and practised as preparation, but the 
powers are those I first named. If I should make 
the shortest list of the qualifications of the orator, I 
should begin with manliness ; arid perhaps it means 
here presence of mind. Men differ so much in con- 
trol of their faculties ! You can find in many, and 
indeed in all, a certain fundamental equality. Fun- 



ELOQUENCE. 113 

damentally all feel alike and think alike, and at a 
great heat they can all express themselves with an 
almost equal force. But it costs a great heat to en- 
able a heavy man to come up with those who have 
a quick sensibility. Thus we have all of us known 
men who lose their talents, their wit, their fancy, at 
any sudden call. Some men, on such pressure, col- 
lapse, and cannot rally. If they are to put a thing 
in proper shape, fit for the occasion and the audi- 
ence, their mind is a blank. Something which any 
boy would tell with color and vivacity they can only 
stammer out with hard literalliess, — say it in the very 
words they heard, and no other. This fault is very 
incident to men of study, — as if the more they had 
read the less they knew. Dr. Charles Chauncy was, 
a hundred years ago, a man of marked ability among 
the clergy of I^ew England. But when once going 
to preach the Thursday lecture in Boston (which in 
those days people walked from Salem to hear), on 
going up the pulpit stairs he was informed that a 
little boy had fallen into Frog Pond on the Common, 
and was drowned, and the doctor was requested to 
improve the sad occasion. ' The doctor was much 
distressed, and in his prayer he hesitated, — he tried 
to ijiake soft approaches, — he prayed for Harvard 
College, he prayed for the schools, he implored the . 
Divine Being " to-to-to bless to them all^the boy 
that was this morning drowned in Frog Pond." 
Now this is not want of talent or learning, but of 



114 ELOQUENCE. 

manliness. The doctor, no doubt, shut up in his 
closet and his theology, had lost some natural re- 
lation to men, and quick application of his thought 
to the course of events. I should add what is told 
of him, — that he so disliked the "sensation" 
preaching of his time that he had once prayed that 
" he might never be eloquent " ; and, it appears, his 
prayer was granted. On the other hand, it would 
be easy to point to many masters whose readiness 
is sure; as the French say of Guizot, that "what 
Guizot learned this morning he has the air of hav- 
ing known from all eternity." This unmanliness is 
so common a result of our half-education, — teach- 
ing a youth Latin and metaphysics and history, and 
neglecting to give him the rough training of a boy, 
— allowing him to skulk from the games of ball and 
skates and coasting down the hills on his sled, and 
whatever else would lead him and keep him on even 
terms with boys, so that he can meet them as an 
equal, and lead in his turn, — that I wish his guar- 
dians to consider that they are thus preparing him to 
play a contemptible part when he is full-grown. In 
England they send the most delicate and protected 
child from his luxurious home to learn to rough it 
with boys in the public schools. A few bruises and 
scratches wiU do him no harm if he has thereby 
learned not to be afraid. It is this wise mixture of 
good drill in Latin grammar with good drill in 
cricket, boating, and wrestling, that is 'the boast 



ELOQUENCE. 115 

of English education, and of high importance to the 
matter in hand. 

Lord Ashley, in 1606, while the bill for regu- 
lating trials in cases of high treason was pending, 
attempting to utter a premeditated speech in Par- 
liament in favor of that clause of the bill which 
allowed the prisoner the benefit of counsel, fell 
into such a disorder that he was not able to pro- 
ceed; but, having recovered his spirits and the 
command of his faculties, he drew such an argu- 
ment from his own confusion as more advantaged 
his cause than all the powers of eloquence could 
have done. " For," said he, '' if I, who had no per- 
sonal concern in the question, was so overpowered 
with my own apprehensions that I could not find 
words to express myself, what must be the case of 
one whose life depended on his own abilities to 
defend it ? " This happy turn did great service in 
promoting that excellent bill. 

These are ascending stairs, — a good voice, win- 
ning manners, plain speech, chastened, however, by 
the schools into correctness ; but we must come to 
the main matter, of power of statement, — know 
your fact; hug your fact. For the essential thing 
is heat, and heat comes of sincerity. Speak what 
you do know and believe, and are personally in it, 
and are answerable for every word. Eloquence is 
the power to translate a truth into language perfectly 
intelligible to the 2>e7^son to whom you speah He 



116 ELOQUENCE. 

who would convince the worthy Mr. Dunderhead of 
any truth which Dunderhead does not see, must be 
a master of his art. Declamation is common ; but 
such possession of thought as is here required, such . 
practical chemistry as the conversion of a truth 
written in God's language into a truth in Dunder- 
head's language, is one of the most beautiful and 
cogent weapons that is forged in the shop of the 
Divine Artificer. 

It was said of Eobespierre's audience, that though 
they understood not the words, they understood 'a 
fury in the words, and caught the contagion. 

This leads us to the high class, the men of char- 
acter who bring an overpowering personality into 
court, and the cause they maintain borrows impor- 
tance from an illustrious advocate. Absoluteness 
is required, and he must have it or simulate it. If 
the cause be unfashionable, he will make it fashion- 
able. 'T is the best man in the best training. If 
he does not know your fact, he will show that it is 
not worth the knowing. Indeed, as great generals 
do not fight many battles, but conquer by tactics, 
so all eloquence is a war of posts. What is said is 
the least part of the oration. It is the attitude 
taken, the unmistakable sign, never so casually 
given, in tone of voice, or manner, or word, that a 
greater spirit speaks from you than is spoken to in 
him. 

But I say, provided your cause is really honest. 



ELOQUENCE. 117 

There is always the previous question : How came 
you on that side ? Your argument is ingenious, 
your language copious, your illustrations brilliant, 
but your major proposition palpably absurd. "Will 
you establish a lie ? You are a very elegant writer, 
but you can't write up what gravitates down. 

An ingenious metaphysical writer, Dr. Stirling 
of Edinburgh, has noted that intellectual works in 
any department breed each other by what he calls 
zymosis, i. e. fermentation ; thus in the Elizabethan 
Age there was a dramatic zymosis, when all the 
genius ran in that direction, until it culminated in 
Shakspeare; so in Germany we have seen a meta- 
physical zymosis culminating in Kant, Schelling, 
Schleiermacher, Schopenhauer, Hegel, and so end- 
ing. To this we might add the great eras not 
only of painters but of orators. The historian Pa- 
terculus says of Cicero, that only in Cicero's lifetime 
was any great eloquence in Eome ; so it was said 
that no member of either house of the British Par- 
liament will be ranked among the orators whom 
Lord ]N'orth did not see, or who did not see Lord 
i^orth. But I should rather say that when a great 
sentiment, as religion or liberty, makes itself 
deeply felt in any age or country, then great orators 
appear. As the Andes and Alleghanies indicate 
the line of the fissure in the crust of the earth along 
which they were lifted, so the great ideas that sud- 
denly expand at some moment the mind of mankind 
indicate themselves by orators. 



118 ELOQUENCE. 

If there ever was a country where eloquence was 
a power, it is in the United States. Here is room 
for every degree of it, on every one of its ascending 
stages, — that of useful speech, in our commercial, 
manufacturing, railroad, and educational conven- 
tions; that of political advice and persuasion on 
the grandest theatre, reaching, as all good men 
trust, into a vast future, and so compelling the best 
thought and noblest administrative ability that the 
citizen can offer. And here are the service of sci- 
ence, the demands of art, and the lessons of religion 
to be brought home to the instant practice of thirty 
millions of people. Is it not worth the ambition 
of every generous youth to train and arm his mind 
with all the resources of knowledge, of method, of 
grace, and of character, to serve such a constitu- 
ency ? 



RESOIJRCES. 



RESOUECES. 



Men are made up of potences. We are magnets 
in an iron globe. We have keys to all doors. We 
are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of 
discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which 
there is no duplicate. The world is all gates, all 
opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be 
struck ; the earth sensitive as iodine to light ; the 
most plastic and impressionable medium, alive to 
every touch, and, whether searched by the plough 
of Adam, the sword of Csesar, the boat of Colum- 
bus, the telescope of Galileo, or the surveyor's chain 
of Picard, or the submarine telegi-aph, to every one 
of these experiments it makes a gracious response. 
I am benefited by every observation of a victory of 
man over nature, — by seeing that wisdom is bet- _ 
ter than strength ; by seeing that every healthy 
and resolute man is an organizer, a method coming 
into a confusion and drawing order out of it. We 
are touched and cheered by every such example. 
We like to see the inexhaustible riches of Nature, 
and the access of every soul to her magazines. 

6 



122 EESOUKCES. 

These examples wake an infinite hope, and call 
every man to emulation. A low, hopeless spirit 
puts out the eyes ; scepticism is slow suicide. A 
philosophy which sees only the worst; believes 
neither in virtue nor in genius ; which says 't is all 
of no use, life is eating us up, 'tis only question 
who shall be last devoured, — dispirits us ; the sky 
shuts down before us. A Schopenhauer, with logic 
and learning and wit, teaching pessimism, — teach- 
ing that this is the worst of all possible worlds, and 
inferring that sleep is better than waking, and death 
than sleep, — all the talent in the world cannot save 
him from being odious. But if, instead of these 
negatives, you give me affirmatives, — ■- if you tell 
me that there is always life for the living ; that 
what man has done man can do ; that this world 
belongs to the energetic ; that there is always a way 
to everything desirable ; that every man is provided, 
in the new bias of his faculty, with a key to nature, 
and that man only rightly knows himself as far as 
he has experimented on things, — I am invigorated, 
put into genial and working temper; the horizon 
opens, and we are full of good-will and gratitude to 
the Cause of Causes. I like the sentiment of the 
poor woman who, coming from a wretched garret 
in an inland manufacturing town for the first time 
to the sea-shore, gazing at the ocean, said " she was 
glad for once in her life to see something which 
there was enough of." 



RESOURCES. 123 

Our Copernican globe is a great factory or shop 
of power, with its rotating constellations, times, 
and tides. The machine is of colossal size ; the 
diameter of the water-wheel, the arms of the levers, 
and the volley of the battery, out of all mechanic 
measure ; and it takes long to understand its parts 
and its workings. This pump never sucks ; these 
screws are never loose ; this machine is never out 
of gear. The vat, the piston, the wheels and tires, 
never wear out, but are self-repairing. Is there 
any load which water cannot lift ? If there be, try 
steam ; or if not that, try electricity. Is there any 
exhausting of these means ? Measure by barrels 
the spending of the brook that runs through your 
field. E"othing is great but the inexhaustible 
wealth of Nature. She shows us only surfaces, but 
she is million fathoms deep. What spaces ! what 
durations! dealing with races as merely prepara- 
tions of somewhat to follow ; or, in humanity, mil- 
lions of lives of men to collect the first observations 
on which our astronomy is built ; millions of lives 
to add only sentiments and guesses, which at last, 
gathered in by an ear of sensibility, make the fur- 
niture of the poet. See how children build up a 
language ; how every traveller, every laborer, every 
impatient boss, who sharply shortens the phrase or 
the word to give his order quicker, reducing it to 
the lowest possible terms, — and there it must stay, 
— improves the national tongue. What power does 



124 RESOUKCES. 

Nature not owe to her duration of amassing infin- 
itesimals into cosmical forces ! 

The marked events in history, as the emigration 
of a colony to a new and more delightful coast ; 
the building of a large ship ; the discovery of the 
mariner's compass, which perhaps the Phoenicians 
made ; the arrival among an old stationary nation 
of a more instructed race, with. new arts: each of 
these events electrifies the tribe to which it befalls ; 
supples the tough barbarous sinew, and brings it 
into that state of sensibility which makes the tran- 
sition to civilization possible and sure. By his 
machines man can dive and remain under water 
like a shark ; can fly like a hawk in the air ; can 
see atoms like a gnat ; can see the system of the 
universe like Uriel, the angel of the sun ; can carry 
whatever loads a ton of coal can lift ; can knock 
down cities with his fist of gunpowder ; can recover 
the history of his race by the medals which the 
^deluge, and every creature, civil or savage or brute, 
has involuntarily dropped of its existence ; and di- 
. vine the future possibility of the planet and its 
inhabitants by his perception of laws of nature. 
Ah ! what a plastic little creature he is 1 so shifty, 
so adaptive ! his body a chest of tools, and he mak- 
ing himself comfortable in every climate, in every 
condition. 

Here in America are all the wealth of soil, of 
timber, of mines, and of the sea, put into the pos- 



RESOURCES. 125 

session of a people who wield all these wonderful 
machines, have the secret of steam, of electricity, 
and have the power and habit of invention in 
their brain. We Americans have got suppled into 
the state of melioration. Life is always rapid 
here, but what acceleration to its pulse in ten 
years, — what in the four years of the war I We 
have seen the railroad and telegraph subdue our 
enormous geography ; we have seen the snowy 
deserts on the northwest, seats of Esquimaux, be- 
come lands of promise. When our population, 
swarming west, had reached the boundary of arable 
land, as if to stimulate our energy, on the face of the 
sterile waste beyond, the land was suddenly in parts 
found covered with gold and silver, floored with 
coal. It was thought a fable, what Guthrie, a travel- 
ler in Persia, told us, that " in Taurida, in any piece 
of ground where springs of naphtha (or petroleum) 
obtain, by merely sticking an iron tube in the 
earth, and applying a light to the upper end, the 
mineral oil will burn till the tube is decomposed, 
or for a vast number of years." But we have found 
the Taurida in Pennsylvania and Ohio. If they 
have not the lamp of Aladdin, they have the Alad- 
din oil. Eesources of America ! why, one thinks 
of St. Simon's saying, " The Golden Age is not 
behind, but before you." Here is man in the Gar- 
den of Eden; here the Genesis and the Exodus. 
We have seen slavery disappear like a painted 



126 EESOUECES. 

scene in a theatre ; we have seen the most health- 
ful revolution in the politics of the nation, — the 
Constitution not only amended, but construed in a 
•new spirit. We have seen China opened to Euro- 
pean and American ambassadors and commerce; 
the like in Japan : our arts and productions begin 
to penetrate both. As the walls of a modern house 
are perforated with water-pipes, sound-pipes, gas- 
pipes, heat-pipes, so geography and geology are 
yielding to man's convenience, and we begin to per- 
forate and mould the old ball, as a carpenter does 
with wood. All is ductile and plastic. We are 
working the new Atlantic telegraph. American en- 
ergy is overriding every venerable maxim of polit- 
ical science. America is such a garden of plenty, 
such a magazine of power, that at her shores all 
the common rules of political economy utterly fail. 
Here is bread, and wealth, and power, and educa- 
tion for every man who has the heart to use his 
opportunity. The creation of power had never any 
parallel. It was thought that the immense produc- 
tion of gold would make gold cheap as pewter. 
But the immense expansion of trade has wanted 
every ounce of gold, and it has not lost its value. 

See how nations of customers are formed. The 
disgust of California has not been able to drive nor 
kick the Chinaman back to his home • and now it 
turns out that he has sent home to China American 
food and tools and luxuries, until he has taught his 



KESOUECES. 127 

people to use them, and a new market has grown up 
for our commerce. The emancipation has brought 
a whole nation of negroes as customers to buy all 
the articles which once their few masters bought, 
and every manufacturer and producer in the North 
has an interest in protecting the negro as the con- 
sumer of his wares. 

The whole history of our civil war is rich in a thou- 
sand anecdotes attesting the fertility of resource, the 
presence of mind, the skilled labor of our people. 
At Annapolis a regiment, hastening to join the army, 
found the locomotives broken, the raiboad destroyed, 
and no rails. The commander called for men in the 
ranks who could rebuild the road. Many men stepped 
forward, searched in the water, found the hidden rails, 
laid the track, put the disabled engine together, and 
continued their journey. The world belongs to the 
energetic man. His will gives him new eyes. He 
sees expedients and means where we saw none. The 
invahd sits shivering in lamb's-wool and furs ; the 
woodsman knows how to make warm garments out 
of cold and wet themselves. The Indian, the sailor, 
the hunter, only these know the power of the hands, 
feet, teeth, eyes, and ears. It is out of the obsta- 
cles to be encountered that they make the means 
of destroying them. The sailor by his boat and sail 
makes a ford out of deepest waters. The hunter, 
the soldier, rolls himself in his blanket, and the 
falling snow, which he did not have to bring in his 



128 RESOUECES. 

knapsack, is his eider-down, in which he sleeps 
warm till the morning. iN'ature herself gives the 
hint and the example, if we have wit to take it. 
See how iN'ature keeps the lakes warm by tucking 
them up under a blanket of ice, and the ground un- 
der a cloak of snow. The old forester is never far 
from shelter ; no matter how remote from camp or 
city, he carries Bangor with him. A sudden shower 
cannot wet him, if he cares to be dry ; he draws 
his boat ashore, turns it over in a twinkling against 
a clump of alders, with cat-briers, which keep up 
the lee-side, crawls under it, with his comrade, and 
lies there till the shower is over, happy in his stout 
roof. The boat is full of water, and resists all your 
strength to drag it ashore and empty it. The fish- 
erman looks about him, puts a round stick of wood 
underneath, and it rolls as on wheels at once. . Na- 
poleon says, the Corsicans at the battle of Golo, not 
having had time to cut down the bridge, which was 
of stone, made use of the bodies of their dead to 
form an intrenchment. Mains, known for his dis- 
coveries in the polarization of light, was captain 
of a corps of engineers in Bonaparte's Egyptian 
campaign, which was heinously unprovided and ex- 
posed. " Wanting a picket to which to attach my 
horse," he says, " I tied him to my leg. I slept, and 
dreamed peaceably of the pleasures of Europe." M. 
Tissenet had learned among the Indians to under- 
stand their language, and, coming among a wild party 



EESOURCES. 129 

of Illinois, he overheard them say that they would 
scalp him. He said to them, "Will you scalp 
me? Here is my scalp," and confounded them 
by lifting a little periwig he wore. He then ex- 
plained to them that he was a great medicine-man, 
and that they did great wrong in wishing to harm 
him, who carried them all in his heart. So he 
opened his shirt a little and showed to each of the 
savages in turn the reflection of his own eyeball in 
a small pocket-mirror which he had -hung next to 
his skin. He assured them that if they should pro- 
voke him he would burn up their rivers and their 
forests ; and, taking from his portmanteau a small 
phial of white brandy, he poured it into a cup, and, 
lighting a straw at the fire in the wigwam, he 
kindled the brandy (which they believed to be 
water), and burned it up before their eyes. Then 
taking up a chip of dry pine, he drew a burning- 
glass from his pocket and set the chip on fire. 

What a new face courage puts on everything! 
A determined man, by his very attitude and the 
tone of his voice, puts a stop to defeat, and begins 
to conquer. " For they can conquer who believe 
they can." Every one hears gladly that cheerful 
voice. He reveals to us the enormous power of 
one man over masses of men ; that one man whose 
eye commands the end in view, and the means by 
which it can be attained, is not only better than 
ten men or a hundred men, but victor over all 

6* I 



130 RESOURCES. 

mankind who do not see the issue and the means. 
" When a man is once possessed with fear," said 
the old French Marshal Montluc, "and loses his 
judgment, as all men in a fright do, he knows not 
what he does. And it is the principal thing you 
are to beg at the hands of Almighty God, to pre- 
serve your understanding entire; for what danger 
soever there may be, there is still one way or other 
to get off, and perhaps to your honor. But when 
fear has once possessed you, God ye good even ! 
You think you are flying towards the poop when 
you are running towards the prow, and for one ene- 
my think you have ten before your eyes, as drunk- 
ards who see a thousand candles at once." 

Against the terrors of the mob, which, intoxicated 
with passion, and once suffered to gain the ascend- 
ant, is diabolic and chaos come again, good sense has 
many arts of prevention and of relief Disorganiza- 
tion it confronts with organization, with police, with 
military force. But in earlier stages of the disorder 
it applies milder and nobler remedies. The natu- 
ral offset of terror is ridicule. And we have noted 
examples among our orators, who have on conspicu- 
ous occasions handled and controlled, and, best of 
all, converted a malignant mob, by superior man- 
hood, and by a wit which disconcerted, and at last 
delighted the ringleaders. What can a poor truck- 
man who is hired to groan and to hiss do, when the 
orator shakes him into convulsions of lauo^hter so 



RESOURCES. 131 

that he cannot throw his eggl If a good story will 
not answer, still milder remedies sometimes serve 
to disperse a mob. Try sending round the contri- 
bution-box. Mr. Marshall, the eminent manufac- 
turer at Leeds, was to preside at a Free-Trade 
festival in that city; it was threatened that the 
operatives, who were in bad humor, would break up 
the meeting by a mob. Mr. Marshall was a man 
of peace; he had the pipes laid from the water- 
works of his mill, with a stopcock by his chair from 
which he could discharge a stream that would 
knock down an ox, and sat down very peacefully 
to his dinner, which was not disturbed. 

See the dexterity of the good aunt in keeping 
the young people all the weary holiday busy and 
diverted without knowing it: the story, the pic- 
tures, the ballad, the game, the cuckoo-clock, the 
stereoscope, the rabbits, the mino bird, the pop-corn, 
and Cbristmas hemlock spurting in the fire. The 
children never suspect how much design goes to it, 
and that this unfailing fertility has been rehearsed 
a hundred times, when the necessity came of find- 
ing for the little Asmodeus a rope of sand to twist. 
She relies on the same principle that makes the 
strength of IvTewton, — alternation of employment. 
See how he refreshed himself, resting from the pro- 
found researches of the calculus by astronomy; from 
astronomy by optics ; from optics by chronology. 
'T is a law of chemistry that every gas is a vacuum 



132 EESOUECES. 

to every other gas; and when the mind has ex- 
hausted its energies for one employment, it is still 
fresh and capable of a different task. We have 
not a toy or trinket for idle amusement, but some- 
where it is the one thing needful for solid instruc- 
tion or to save the ship or army. In the Mammoth 
Cave in Kentucky, the torches which each traveller 
carries make a dismal funeral procession, and serve 
no purpose but to see the ground. When now and 
then the vaulted roof rises high overhead, and hides 
all its possibilities in lofty depths, 't is but gloom 
on gloom. But the guide kindled a Eoman candle, 
and held it here and there shooting its fireballs suc- 
cessively into each crypt of the groined roof, dis- 
closing its starry splendor, and showing for the first 
time what that plaything was good for. 

Whether larger or less, these strokes and all ex- 
ploits rest at last on the wonderful structure of the 
mind. And we learn that our doctrine of resources 
must be carried into higher application, namely, to 
the intellectual sphere. But every power in energy 
speedily arrives at its limits, and requires to be 
husbanded; the law of light, which !N'ewton said 
proceeded by " fits of easy reflection and transmis- 
sion " ; the come-and-go of the pendulum is the 
law of mind ; alternation of labors is its rest. I 
should like to have the statistics of bold experi- 
menting on the husbandry of mental power. 

In England men of letters drink wine ; in Scot- 



RESOURCES. 133 

land, whiskey ; in France, light wines ; in Germany, 
beer. In England everybody rides in the saddle ; 
in France the theatre and the ball occupy the 
night. In this country we have not learned how 
to repair the exhaustions of our climate. Is not 
the seaside necessary in summer ? Games, fishing, 
bowling, hunting, gymnastics, dancing, — are not 
these needful to you ? The chapter of pastimes is 
very long. There are better games than billiards 
and whist. 'T was a pleasing trait in Goethe's 
romance, that Makaria retires from society "to 
astronomy and her correspondence." 

I do not know that the treatise of Brillat Savarin 
on the Physiology of Taste deserves its fame. I 
know its repute, and I have heard it called the 
France of France. But the subject is so large and 
exigent that a few particulars, and those the pleas- 
ures of the epicure, cannot satisfy. I know many 
men of taste whose single opinions and practice 
would interest much more. It should be extended 
to gardens and grounds, and mainly one thing 
should be illustrated: that life in the country 
wants all things on a low tone, — wants coarse 
clothes, old shoes, no fleet horse that a man can- 
not hold, but an old horse that will stand tied 
in a pasture half a day without risk, so allowing 
the picnic-party the full freedom of the woods. 
Natural history is, in the country, most attractive ; 
at once elegant, immortal, always opening new 



134 RESOURCES. 

resorts. The first care of a man settling in the 
country should be to open the face of the earth to 
himself, by a little knowledge of nature, or a great 
deal, if he can, of birds, plants, rocks, astronomy ; 
in short, the art of taking a walk. This wiU draw 
the sting out of frost, dreariness out of November 
and March, and the drowsiness out of August. To 
know the trees is, as Spenser says of " the ash, for 
nothing ill." Shells, too ; how hungry I found my- 
self, the other day, at Agassiz's Museum, for their 
names ! But the uses of the woods are many, and 
some of them for the scholar high and peremp- 
tory. When his task requires the wiping out from 
memory 

*' all trivial fond records 
That youth and observation copied there, 'V 

he must leave the house, the streets, and the club, 
and go to wooded uplands, to the clearing and the 
brook. Well for him if he can say with the old 
minstrel, " I know where to find a new song." 

If I go into the woods in winter, and am shown 
the thirteen or fourteen species of willow that grow 
in Massachusetts, I learn that they quietly expand 
in the warmer days, or when nobody is looking 
at them, and, though insignificant enough in the 
general bareness of the forest, yet a great change 
takes place in them between fall and spring ; in 
the first relentings of March they hasten, and long 
before anything else is ready, these osiers hang 



EESOURCES. 135 

out their joyful flowers in contrast to all the woods. 
You cannot tell when they do bud and blossom, 
these vivacious trees, so ancient, for they are almost 
the oldest of all. Among fossil remains, the willow 
and the pine appear with the ferns. They bend all 
day to every wind ; the cart-wheel in the road may 
crush them ; every passenger may strike off a twig 
with his cane ; every boy cuts them for a whistle ; 
the cow, the rabbit, the insect, bite the sweet and 
tender bark ; yet, in spite of accident and enemy, 
their gentle persistency lives when the oak is shat- 
tered by storm, and grows in the night and snow 
and cold. When I see in these brave plants this 
vigor and immortality in weakness, I find a sudden 
relief and pleasure in observing the mighty law of 
vegetation, and I think it more grateful and health- 
giving than any news I am likely to find of man in 
the journals, and better than Washington politics. 

It is easy to see that there is no limit to the 
chapter of Kesources. I have not, in all these 
rambling sketches, gone beyond the beginning of 
my list. Eesources of Man, — it is the inventory 
of the world, the roll of arts and sciences ; it is the 
whole of memory, the whole of invention ; it is all 
the power of passion, the majesty of virtue, and the 
omnipotence of will. 

But the one fact that shines through all this 
plenitude of powers is, that; as is the receiver, so is 



136 EESOURCES. 

the gift ; that all these acquisitions are victories of 
the good brain and brave heart ; that the world be- 
longs to the energetic, belongs to the wise. It is in 
vain to make a paradise but for good men. The 
tropics are one vast garden ; yet man is more mis- 
erably fed and conditioned there than in the cold 
and stingy zones. The healthy, the civil, the in- 
dustrious, the learned, the moral race, — Nature 
herself only yields her secret to these. And the 
resources of America and its future will be im- 
mense only to wise and virtuous men. 



THE COMIC. 



THE COMIC. 



A TASTE for fun is all but universal in our species, 
which is the only joker in nature. The rocks, the 
plants, the beasts, the birds, neither do anything 
ridiculous, nor betray a perception of anything 
absurd done in their presence. And as the lower 
nature does not jest, neither does the highest. The 
Eeason pronounces its omniscient yea and nay, but 
meddles never with degrees or fractions ; and it 
is in comparing fractions with essential integers or 
wholes that laughter begins. 

Aristotle's definition of the ridiculous is, " what 
is out of time and place, without danger." If there 
be pain and danger, it becomes tragic ; if not, comic. 
I confess, this definition, though by an admirable 
definer, does not satisfy me, does not say all we 
know. 

The essence of all jokes, of all comedy, seems to 
be an honest or well-intended halfness ; a non-per- 
formance of what is pretended to be pe;Kformed, at 
the same time that one is giving loud pledges of 
performance. The balking of the intellect, the 



140 THE COMIC. 

frustrated expectation, the break of continuity in 
the intellect, is comedy ; and it announces itself 
physically in the pleasant spasms we call laughter. 
With the trifling exception of the stratagems of 
a few beasts and birds, there is no seeming, no half- 
ness in nature, until the appearance of man. Un- 
conscious creatures do the whole will of wisdom. 
An oak or a chestnut undertakes no function it can- 
not execute; or if there be phenomena in botany 
which we call abortions, the abortion is also a 
function of nature, and assumes to the intellect 
the like completeness with the further function, 
to which in different circumstances it had attained. 
The same rule holds true of the animals. Their ac- 
tivity is marked by unerring good-sense. But man, 
through his access to Eeason, is capable of the per- 
ception of a whole and a part. Eeason is the whole, 
and whatsoever is not that is a part. The whole 
of nature is agreeable to the whole of thought, or 
to the Eeason ; but separate any part of nature, 
and attempt to look at it as a whole by itself, and 
the feeling of the ridiculous begins. The perpetual 
game of humor is to look with considerate good- 
nature at every object in existence aloof, as a man 
might look at a mouse, comparing it with the eter- 
nal Whole ; enjoying the figure which each self- 
satisfied particular creature cuts in the unrespecting 
All, and dismissing it with a benison. Separate any 
object, as a particular bodily man, a horse, a turnip. 



THE COMIC. 141 

a flour-barrel, an umbrella, from the connection of 
things, and contemplate it alone, standing there in 
absolute nature, it becomes at once comic ; no 
useful, no respectable qualities can rescue it from 
the ludicrous. 

In virtue of man's access to Eeason or the Whole, 
the human form is a pledge of wholeness, suggests 
to our imagination the perfection of truth or good- 
ness, and exposes by contrast any halfness or im- 
perfection. We have a primary association between 
perfectness and this form. But the facts that oc- 
cur when actual men enter do not make good this 
anticipation ; a discrepancy which is at once de- 
tected by the intellect, and the outward sign is the 
muscular irritation of laughter. 

Eeason does not joke, and men of reason do not ; 
a prophet, in whom the moral sentiment predomi- 
nates, or a philosopher, in whom the love of truth 
predominates, these do not joke, but they bring the 
standard, the ideal whole, exposing all actual de- 
fect ; and hence, the best of all jokes is the sympa- 
thetic contemplation of things by the understand- 
ing from the philosopher's point of view. There is 
no joke so true and deep in actual life, as when 
some pure idealist goes up and down among the in- 
stitutions of society, attended by a man who knows 
the world, and who, sympathizing with the philoso- 
pher's scrutiny, sympathizes also with the confusion 
and indignation of the detected skulking institu- 



142 THE COMIC. 

tions. His perception of disparity, his feye wander- 
ing perpetually from the rule to the crooked, lying, 
thieving fact, makes the eyes run over with laugh- 
ter. 

This is the radical joke of life and then of litera- 
ture. The presence of the ideal of right and of 
truth in all action makes the yawning delinquen- 
cies of practice remorseful to the conscience, tragic 
to the interest, but droll to the intellect. The ac- 
tivity of our sympathies may for a time hinder our 
perceiving the fact intellectually, and so deriving 
mirth from it ; but all falsehoods, all vices seen at 
sufficient distance, seen from the point where our 
moral sympathies do not interfere, become ludi- 
crous. The comedy is in the intellect's perception 
of discrepancy. And whilst the presence of the 
ideal discovers the difference, the comedy is en- 
hanced whenever that ideal is embodied visibly in 
a man. Thus Falstaff, in Shakspeare, is a character 
of the broadest comedy, giving himself unreservedly 
to his senses, coolly ignoring the Eeason, whilst he 
invokes its name, pretending to patriotism and to 
parental virtues, not with any intent to deceive, but 
only to make the fun perfect by enjoying the con- 
fusion betwixt reason and the negation of reason, — 
in other words, the rank rascaldom he is calling by 
its name. Prince Hal stands by, as the acute un- 
derstanding, who sees the Eight and sympathizes 
with it, and in the heyday of youth feels also the 



THE COMIC. 143 

full attractions of pleasure, and is thus eminently- 
qualified to enjoy the joke. At the same time he 
is to that degree under the Eeason, that it does not 
amuse him as much as it amuses another spectator. 

If the essence of the comic be the contrast in 
the intellect between the idea and the false per- 
formance, there is good reason why we should be 
affected by the exposure. We have no deeper in- 
terest than our integrity, and that we should be 
made aware by joke and by stroke, of any lie we 
entertain. Besides, a perception of the comic seems 
to be a balance-wheel in our metaphysical structure. 
It appears to be an essential element in a fine 
character. Wherever the intellect is constructive, 
it will be found. We feel the absence of it as a 
defect in the noblest and most oracular soul. The 
perception of the comic is a tie of sympathy with 
other men, a pledge of sanity, and a protection from 
those perverse tendencies and gloomy insanities in 
which fine intellects sometimes lose themselves. A 
rogue alive to the ludicrous is still convertible. If 
that sense is lost, his fellow-men can do little for 
him. 

It is true the sensibility to the ludicrous may run 
into excess. Men celebrate their perception of half- 
ness and a latent lie by the peculiar explosions of 
laughter. So painfully susceptible are some men to 
these impressions, that if a man of wit come into 
the room where they are, it seems to take them out 



144 THE COMIC. 

of themselves with violent convulsions of the face 
and sides, and obstreperous roarings of the throat. 
How often and with what unfeigned compassion we 
have seen such a person receiving like a willing 
martyr the whispers into his ear of a man of wit. 
The victim who has just received the discharge, if 
in a solemn company, has the air very much of a 
stout vessel which has just shipped a heavy sea ; 
and though it does not split it,, the poor bark is for 
the moment critically staggered. The peace of so- 
ciety and the decorum of tables seem to require 
that next to a notable wit should always be posted 
a phlegmatic bolt-upright man, able to stand without 
movement of muscle whole broadsides of this Greek 
fire. It is a true shaft of Apollo, and traverses the 
universe, and unless it encounter a mystic or a dump- 
ish soul, goes everywhere heralded and harbingered 
by smiles and greetings. Wit makes its own wel- 
come, and levels all distinctions. ISTo dignity, no 
learning, no force of character, can make any stand 
against good wit. It is like ice, on which no beauty 
of form, no majesty of carriage, can plead any im- 
munity, — they must walk gingerly, according to 
the laws of ice, or down they must go, dignity and 
all. "Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, 
there shall be no more cakes and ale ? " Plutarch 
happily expresses the value of the jest as a legiti- 
mate weapon of the philosopher. "Men cannot 
exercise their rhetoric unless they speak, but their 



THE coMrc. 145 

piiilosophy even whilst they are silent or jest mer- 
rily ; for as it is the highest degree of injustice not 
to be just and yet seem so, so it is the top of wis- 
dom to philosophize yet not appear to do it, and in 
mirth to do the same with those that are serious 
and seem in earnest ; for as in Euripides, the Bac- 
chse, though unprovided of iron weapons and un- 
armed, wounded their invaders with the boughs of 
trees, which they carried, thus the very jests and 
merry talk of true philosophers move tho^se that are 
not altogether insensible, and unusually reform." 

In all the parts of life, the occasion of laughter is 
some seeming, some keeping of the word to the ear 
and eye, whilst it is broken to the soul. Thus, as 
the religious sentiment is the most vital and sub- 
lime of all our sentiments, and capable of the most 
prodigious effects, so is it abhorrent to our whole 
nature, when, in the absence of the sentiment, the 
act or word or officer volunteers to stand in its 
stead. To the sympathies this is shocking, and oc- 
casions grief. But to the intellect the lack of the ' 
sentiment gives no pain ; it compares incessantly 
the sublime idea with the bloated nothing which 
pretends to be it, and the sense of the disproportion 
is comedy. And as the religious sentiment is the 
most real and earnest thing in nature, being a mere 
rapture, and excluding, when it appears, all other 
considerations, the vitiating this is the greatest lie. 
Therefore, the oldest gibe of literature is the ridicule 



146 THE COMIC. 

of false religion. This is the joke of jokes. In re- 
ligion, the sentiment is all ; the ritual or ceremony 
indifferent. But the inertia of men inclines them, 
when the sentiment sleeps, to imitate that thing it 
did ; it goes through the ceremony omitting only 
the will, makes the mistake of the wig for the head, 
the clothes for the man. The older the mistake and 
the more overgrown the particular form is, the more 
ridiculous to the intellect. Captain John Smith, 
the discoverer of 'New England, was not wanting 
in humor. The Society in London which had con- 
tributed their means to convert the savages, hop- 
ing doubtless to see the Keokuks, Black Hawks, 
Bearing Thunders, and Tustanuggees of that day 
converted into church-wardens and deacons at least, 
pestered the gallant rover with frequent solicitations 
out of England touching the conversion of the In- 
dians, and the enlargement of the Church. Smith, in 
his perplexity how to satisfy the Society, sent out a 
party into the swamp, caught an Indian, and sent 
him home in the first ship to London, telling the 
Society they might convert one themselves. 

The satire reaches its climax when the actual 
Church is set in direct contradiction to the dictates 
of the religious sentiment, as in the sketch of our 
Puritan politics in Hudibras : — 

" Our brethren of New England use 
Choice malefactors to excuse, 
And hang the guiltless in their stead, 
Of whom the churches have less need ; 



THE COMIC. 147 

As lately happened, in a town 
Where lived a cobbler, and but one, 
That out of doctrine could cut use, 
And mend men's lives as well as shoes. 
This precious brother having slain, 
In times of peace, an Indian, 
Not out of malice, but mere zeal 
(Because he was an infidel), 
The mighty Tottipottymoy 
Sent to our elders an envoy, 
Complaining loudly of the breach 
Of league held forth by Brother Patch, ^ 
Against the articles in force 
Between both churches, his and ours. 
For which he craved the saints to render 
Into his hands, or hang the offender ; 
But they, maturely having weighed 
They had no more but him o' th' trade 
(A man that served them in the double 
Capacity to teach and cobble), 
Kesolved to spare him ; yet to do 
The Indian Hoghan Moghan too 
Impartial justice, in his stead did 
Hang an old weaver that was bedrid." 

In science the jest at pedantry is analogous to 
that in religion which lies against superstition. A 
classification or nomenclature used by the scholar 
only as a memorandum of his last lesson in the laws 
of nature, and confessedly a makeshift, a bivouac 
for a night, and implying a march and a conquest 
to-morrow, becomes through indolence a barrack 
and a prison, in which the man sits down immov- 
ably, and wishes to detain others. The physiolo- 



148 THE COMIC. - M 

gist Camper, humorously confesses the effect of his 
studies in dislocating his ordinary associations. " I 
have been employed," he says, " six months on the 
Cetacea ; I understand the osteology of the head of 
all these monsters, and have made the combination 
with the human head so well, that everybody now 
appears to me narwhale, porpoise, or marsouins. 
.Women, the prettiest in society, and those whom I 
find less comely, they are all either narwhales or 
porpoises to my eyes." I chanced the other day to 
fall in with an odd illustration of the remark I had 
heard, that the laws of disease are as beautiful as 
the laws of health ; I was hastening to visit an old 
and honored friend, who, I was informed, was in a 
dying condition, when I met his physician, who 
accosted me in great spirits, with joy sparkling in 
his eyes. " And how is my friend, the reverend 
Doctor ? " I inquired. " 0, 1 saw him this morn- 
ing ; it is the most correct apoplexy I have ever 
seen : face and hands livid, breathing stertorous, 
all the symptoms perfect." And he rubbed his 
hands with delight, for in the country we cannot 
find every day a case that agrees with the diagnosis 
of the books. I think there is malice in a very 
trifling story which goes about, and which I should 
not take any notice of, did I not suspect it to con- 
tain some satire upon my brothers of the Natural 
History Society. It is of a boy who was learning 
his alphabet. " That letter is A," said the teacher ; 



THE COMIC. • 149 

"A," drawled the boy. "That is B," said the 
teacher ; " B," drawled the boy, and so on. " That 
is W," said the teacher. " The devil ! " exclaimed 
the boy, "is that W?" 

The pedantry of literature belongs to the same 
category. In both cases there is a lie, when the 
mind, seizing a classification to help it to a sincerer 
knowledge of the fact, stops in the classification ; 
or learning languages, and reading books, to the end 
of a better acquaintance with man, stops in the 
languages and books : in both the learner seems to 
be wise, and is not. 

The same falsehood, the same confusion of the_ 
sympathies because a pretension is not made good, 
points the perpetual satire against poverty, since, 
according to Latin poetry and English doggerel, ' 

Poverty does nothing worse 
Than to make man ridiculous. 

In this instance the halfness lies in the pretension 
of the parties to some consideration on account of 
their condition. If the man is not ashamed of his 
poverty, there is no joke. The poorest man who 
stands on his manhood destroys the jest. The 
poverty of the saint, of the rap,t philosopher, of the 
naked Indian, is not comic. The lie is in the sur- 
render of -the man to his appearance; as if a man 
should neglect himself, and treat his shadow on the 
wall with marks of infinite respect. It affects us 



150 THE COMIC. 

oddly, as to see things turned upside down, or to see 
a man in a high wind run after his hat, which is al- 
ways droll. The relation of the parties is inverted, — 
hat being for the moment master, the by-standers 
cheering the hat. The multiplication of artificial 
wants and expenses in civilized life, and the exag- 
geration of all trifling forms, present innumerable 
occasions for this discrepancy to expose itself. Such 
is the story told of the painter Astley, who, going 
out of Eome one day with a party for a ramble in the 
Campagna, and the weather proving hot, refused to 
take off his coat when his companions threw off 
theirs, but sweltered on ; which, exciting remark, his 
comrades playfully forced off his coat, and behold on 
the back of his waistcoat a gay cascade was thun- 
dering down the rocks with foam and rainbow, very 
refreshing in so sultry a day, — a picture of his own, 
with which the poor painter had been fain to repair 
the shortcomings of his wardrobe. The same aston- 
ishment of the intellect at the disappearance of the 
man out of nature, through some superstition of his 
house or equipage, as if truth and virtue should be 
bowed out of creation by the clothes they wore, is 
the secret of all the fun that circulates concerning 
eminent fops and fashionists, and, in like manner, of 
the gay Eameau of Diderot, who believes in noth- 
ing but hunger, and that the sole end of art, virtue, 
and poetry is to put something for mastication be- 
tween the upper and lower mandibles. 



THE COMIC. 151 

Alike in all these cases and in the instance of 
cowardice or fear of any sort, from the loss of life 
to the loss of spoons, the majesty of man is violated. 
He, whom all things should serve, serves some one 
of his own tools. In fine pictures the head sheds 
on the limbs the expression of the face. In Ea- 
phael's Angel driving Heliodorus from the Temple, 
the crest of the helmet is so remarkable, that but 
for the extraordinary energy of the face, it would 
draw the eye too much ; but the countenance of the 
celestial messenger subordinates it, and we see it 
not. In poor pictures the limbs and trunk degrade 
the face. So among the women in the street : you 
shall see one whose bonnet and dress are one thing, 
and the lady herself quite another, wearing withal 
an expression of meek submission to her bonnet 
and dress; and another whose dress obeys and 
heightens the expression of her form. 

More food for the comic is afforded whenever the 
personal appearance, the face, form, and manners, 
are subjects of thought with the man himself. No 
fashion is the best fashion for those matters which 
will take care of themselves. This is the butt of 
those jokes of the Paris drawing-rooms, which 
Napoleon reckoned so formidable, and which are 
copiously recounted in the French M^moires. A 
lady of high rank, but of lean figure, had given the 
Countess Dulauloy the nickname of " Le Grenadier 
tricolore," in allusion to her tall figure, as well as to 



152 , THE COMIC. 

her republican opinions ; the Countess retaliated by 
calling Madame " the Yenus of the Pere-la-Chaise," 
a compliment to her skeleton which did not fail to 
circulate. " Lord C," said the Countess of Gordon, 
"0, he is a perfect comb, all teeth and back." 
The Persians have a pleasant story of Tamerlane 
which relates to the same particulars : " Timur was 
an ugly man ; he had a blind eye and a lame foot. 
One day when Chodscha was with him, Timur 
scratched his head, since the hour of the barber 
was come, and commanded that the barber should 
be called. Whilst he was shaven, the barber gave 
him a looking-glass in his hand. Timur saw him- 
self in the mirror and found his face quite too ugly. 
Therefore he began to weep ; Chodscha also set him- 
self to weep, and so they wept for two hours. On 
this, some courtiers began to comfort Timur, and 
entertained him with strange stories in order to 
make him forget all about it. Timur ceased weep- 
ing, but Chodscha ceased not, but began now first 
to weep amain, and in good earnest. At last said 
Timur to Chodscha, ' Hearken ! I have looked 
in the mirror, and seen myself ugly. Thereat I 
grieved, because, although I am Caliph, and have 
also much wealth, and many wives, yet still I am 
so ugly; therefore have I wept. But thou, why 
weepest thou without ceasing ? ' Chodscha an- 
swered, ' If thou hast only seen thy face once, and 
at once seeing hast not been able to contain thyself. 



THE COMIC. 153 

but hast wept, what should we do, — we who see 
thy face every day and night ? If we weep not, 
who should weep ? Therefore have I wept.' Ti- 
mur almost split his sides with laughing." 

Politics also furnish the same mark for satire. 
What is nobler than the expansive sentiment of 
patriotism, which would find brothers in a whole 
nation ? But when this enthusiasm is perceived to 
end in the very intelligible maxims of trade, so much 
for so much, the intellect feels again the half-man. 
Or what is fitter than that we should espouse and 
carry a principle against all opposition ? But when 
the men appear who ask our votes as representa- 
tives of this ideal, we are sadly out of counte- 
nance. 

But there is no end to this analysis. We do 
nothing that is not laughable whenever we quit our 
spontaneous sentiment. All our plans, manage- 
ments, houses, poems, if compared with the wisdom 
and love which man represents, are equally imper- 
fect and ridiculous. But we cannot afford to part 
with any advantages. We must learn by laughter, 
as well as by tears and terrors ; explore the whole 
of nature, — the farce and buffoonery in the yard 
below, as well as the lessons of poets and philoso- 
phers upstairs, in the hall, — and get the rest and 
refreshment of the shaking of the sides. But the 
comic also has its own speedy limits. Mirth quick- 
ly becomes intemperate, and the man would soon 



154 THE COMIC. 

die of inanition, as some persons have been tickled 
to death. The same scourge whips the joker and 
the enjoyer of the joke. When Carlini was con- 
vulsing I^aples with laughter, a patient waited on a 
physician in that city, to obtain some remedy for 
excessive melancholy, which was rapidly consuming 
his . life. The physician endeavored to cheer his 
spirits, and advised him to go to the theatre and 
see CarlinL He replied, " I am Carlini." 



QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY. 



QUOTATION AND ORiaiNALITY. 

Whoever looks at the insect world, at flies, 
aphides, gnats, and innumerable parasites, and 
even at the infant mammals, must have remarked 
the extreme content they take in suction, which 
constitutes the main business of their life. If we 
go into a library or news-room, we see the same 
function on a higher plane, performed with like 
ardor, with equal impatience of interruption, indi- 
cating the sweetness of the act. In the highest 
civilization the book is still the highest delight. 
He who has once known its satisfactions is pro- 
vided with a resource against calamity. Like 
Plato's disciple who has perceived a truth, " he is 
preserved from harm imtil another period." In 
every man's memory, with the hours when life cul- 
minated are usually associated certain books which 
met his views. Of a large and powerful class we 
might ask with confidence, "What is the event they 
most desire ? what gift ? What but the book that 
shall come, which they have sought through all 
libraries, through all languages, that shall be to 



158 QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY. 

their mature eyes what many a tinsel-covered toy 
pamphlet was to. their childhood, and shall speak 
to the imagination ? Our high respect for a well- 
read man is praise enough of literature. If we 
encountered a man of rare intellect, we should ask 
him what books he read. We expect a great man 
to be a good reader ; or in proportion to the spon- 
taneous power should be the assimilating power. 
And though such are a more difficult and exacting 
class, they are not less eager. "He that borrows 
the aid of an equal understanding," said Burke, 
" doubles his own ; he that uses that of a superior 
elevates his own to the stature of that he contem- 
plates." 

We prize books, and they prize them most who 
are themselves wise. Our debt to tradition through 
reading and conversation is so massive, our protest 
or private addition so rare and insignificant, — and 
this commonly on the ground of other reading or 
hearing, — that, in a large sense, one would say 
there is no pure originality. All minds quote. Old 
and new make the warp and woof of every moment. 
There is no thread that is not a twist of these two 
strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, 
we all quote. We quote not only books and proverbs, 
but arts, sciences, religion, customs, and laws ; nay, 
we quote temples and houses, tables and chairs by 
imitation. The Patent-Office Commissioner knows 
that all machines in use have been invented and 



< QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY. 159 

re-invented over and over ; that tlae mariner's com- 
pass, the boat, the pendulum, glass, movable types, 
the kaleidoscope, the railway, the power-loom, etc., 
have been many times found and lost, from Egypt, 
China, and Pompeii down; and if we have arts which 
Rome wanted, so also Eome had arts which we have 
lost ; that the invention of yesterday of making wood 
indestructible by means of vapor of coal-oil or paraf- 
fine was suggested by the Egyptian method which 
has preserved its mummy-cases four thousand years. 

The highest statement of new philosophy com- 
placently caps itself with some prophetic maxim 
from the oldest learning. There is something mor- 
tifying in this perpetual circle. This extreme econ- 
omy argues a very small capital of invention. The 
stream of affection flows broad and strong ; the prac- 
tical activity is a river of supply ; but the dearth 
of design accuses the penury of intellect. How few 
thoughts ! In a hundred years, millions of men, 
and not a hundred lines of poetry, not a theory of 
philosophy that offers a solution of the great prob- 
lems, not an art of education that fulfils the condi- 
tions. In this delay and vacancy of thought we 
must make the best amends we can by seeking the 
wisdom of others to fill the time. 

If we 'confine ourselves to literature, 't is easy to 
see that the debt is immense to past thought. 'None 
escapes it. The originals are not original. There is 
imitation, model, and suggestion, to the very arch- 



160 QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY. 

angels, if we knew their history. The first book 
tyrannizes over the second. Eead Tasso, and you 
think of Virgil; read Virgil, and you think of 
Homer; and Milton forces you to reflect how 
narrow are the limits of human invention. The 
"Paradise Lost" had never existed but for these 
precursors ; and if we find in India or Arabia a 
book out of our horizon of thought and tradition, « 
we are soon taught by new researches in its native! 
country to discover its foregoers, and its latent, but i 
real connection with our own Bibles. 

Eead in Plato, and yOu shall find Christian dogr 
mas, and not only so, but stumble on our evangel- 
ical phrases. Hegel pre-exists in Proclus, and, 
long before, in Heraclitus and Parmenides. Whoso 
knows Plutarch, Lucian, Eabelais, Montaigne, and 
Bayle will have a key to many supposed originali- 
ties. Eabelais is the source of many a proverb, 
story, and jest, derived from him into all modern 
languages ; and if we knew Eabelais's reading, we , 
should see the rill of the Eabelais river. Sweden- 
borg, Behmen, Spinoza, will appear original to un- 
instructed and to thoughtless persons : their origi- 
nality will disappear to such as are either well- 
read or thoughtful ; for scholars will recognize their 
dogmas as reappearing in men of a similar intel- 
lectual elevation throughout history. Albert, the 
"wonderful doctor," St. Buonaventura, the "seraphic 
doctor," Thomas Aquinas, the "angelic doctor" of 



QUOTATION AND OKIGINALITY. 161 

the tHirteenth century, whose books made the suf- 
ficient culture of these ages, Dante absorbed and 
he survives for us. " Eenard the Fox," a German 
poem of the thirteenth century, was long supposed 
to be the original work, until Grimm found frag- 
ments of another original a century older. M. Le 
Grand showed that in the old Fabliaux were the 
originals of the tales of Moliere, La Fontaine, Boc- 
caccio, and of Voltaire. 

Mythology is no man's work ; but, what we daily 
observe in regard to the hon-mots that circulate in 
society, — that every talker helps a story in repeat- 
ing it, until, at last, from the slenderest filament 
of fact a good fable is constructed, — the same 
growth befalls mythology: the legend is tossed 
from believer to poet, from poet to believer, every- 
body adding a grace or dropping a fault or round- 
ing the form, until it gets an ideal truth. 

Eeligious literature, the psalms and liturgies of 
churches, are of course of this slow growth, — a 
fagot of selections gathered through ages, leaving 
the worse, and saving the better, until it is at last 
the work of the whole communion of worshippers. 
The Bible itself is like an old Cremona; it has 
been played upon by the devotion of thousands of 
years, until every word and particle is public and 
tunable. And whatever undue reverence may have 
been claimed for it by the prestige of philonic in- 
spiration, the stronger tendency we are describing 



162 QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY. 

is likely to undo. What divines had assumed as 
the distinctive revelations of Christianity, theologic 
criticism has matched by exact parallelisms from 
the Stoics and poets of Greece and Eome. Later, 
when Confucius and the Indian scriptures were 
made known, no claim to monopoly of ethical wis- 
dom could be thought of ; and the surprising results 
of the new researches into the history of Egypt 
have opened to us the deep debt of the churches 
of Kome and England to the Egyptian hierology. 
The borrowing is often honest enough, and comes 
of magnanimity and stoutness. A great man quotes 
bravely and will not draw on his invention when 
his memory serves him with a word as good. 
What he quotes, he fills with his own voice and 
humor, and the whole cyclopaedia of his table-talk 
is presently believed to be his own. Thirty years 
ago, when Mr. Webster at the bar or in the Senate 
tilled the eyes and minds of young men, you might 
often hear cited as Mr. Webster's three rales : first, 
never to do to-day what he could defer till to-mor- 
row ; secondly, never to do himself what he could 
make another do for him ; and, thirdly, never to pay 
any debt to-day. Well, they are none the worse 
for being already told, in the last generation, of 
Sheridan; and we find in Grimm's Memoires that 
Sheridan got them from the witty D'Argenson ; 
who, no doubt, if we could consult him, could tell 
of whom he first heard them told. In our own 



QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY. 163 

college days we remember hearing other pieces ©f 
Mr. Webster's advice to students, — among others, 
this : that, when he opened a new book, he turned 
to the table of contents, took a pen, and sketched 
a sheet of matters and topics, — what he knew and 
what he thought, — before he read the book. But 
we find in Southey's " Commonplace Book " this 
said of the Earl of Strafford : " I learned one rule 
of him," says Sir G. Eadcliffe, "which I think 
worthy to be remembered. When he met with a 
well-penned oration or tract upon any subject, he 
framed a speech upon the same argument, inventing 
and disposing what seemed fit to be said upon that 
subject, before he read the book ; then, reading, 
compared his own with the author's, and noted 
his own defects and the author's art and fulness; 
whereby he drew all that ran in the author more 
strictly, and might better judge of his own wants 
to supply them." I remember to have heard 
Mr. Samuel Eogers, in London, relate, among 
other anecdotes of the Duke of Wellington, that 
a lady having expressed in his presence a pas- 
sionate wish to witness a great victory, he replied : 
" Madam, there is nothing so dreadful as a great 
victory, — excepting a great defeat." But this 
speech is also D'Argenson's, and is reported by 
Grimm. So the sarcasm attributed to Lord Eldon 
upon Brougham, his predecessor on the woolsack, 
" What a wonderful versatile mind has Brougham ! 



164 QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY. 

he knows politics, Greek, history, science; if he 
only knew a little of law, he would know a little 
of everything." You may find the original of this 
gihe in Grimm, who says that Louis XVI., going 
out of chapel after hearing a sermon from the Abbe 
Maury, said, ''Si VAbM nous avail parU^un peu 
de religion, il nous aurait ;parU de toutr A pleas- 
antry which ran through all the newspapers a few 
years since, taxing the eccentricities of a gifted 
family connection in New England, was only a 
theft of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's mot of a 
hundred years ago, that " the world was made up of 
men and women and Herveys." 

Many of the historical proverbs have a doubtful 
paternity. Columbus's egg is claimed for Brunel- 
leschi. Eabelais's dying words, " I am going to see 
the great Perhaps " {le grand Peut-etre), only repeats 
the " IF " inscribed on the portal of the temple at 
Delphi. Goethe's favorite phrase, "the open secret," 
translates Aristotle's answer to Alexander, " These 
books are published and not published." Madame 
de Stael's " Architecture is frozen music " is bor- 
rowed from Goethe's " dumb music," which is Vi- 
truvius's rule, that "the architect must not only 
understand drawing, but music." Wordsworth's 
hero acting " on the plan which pleased his child- 
ish thought," is Schiller's " Tell him to reverence 
the dreams of his youth," and .earlier, Bacon's " Con- 
silia juventutis plus divinitatis hahent'^- 



QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY. 165 

In romantic literature examples of this vamping 
abound. The fine verse in the old Scotch ballad of 
" The Drowned Lovers/' 

" Thou art roaring ower loud, Clyde water, 
Thy streams are ower Strang ; 
Make me thy wrack Avhen I come back, 
But spare me when I gang," 

is a translation of Martial's epigram on Hero and 
Leander, where the prayer of Leander is the 
same : — 

** Parcite dum propero, mergite dum redeo." 

Hafiz furnished Burns with the song of " John Bar- 
leycorn," and furnished Moore with the original of 
the piece, 

** When in death I shall calm recline, 
Oh, bear my heart to my mistress dear," etc. 

There are many fables which, as they are found 
in every language, and betray no sign of being 
borrowed, are said to be agreeable to the human 
mind. Such are " The Seven Sleepers," " Gyges's 
Eing," " The Travelling Cloak," " The Wandering 
Jew," " The Pied Piper," " Jack and his Beanstalk," 
the " Lady Diving in the Lake and Eising in the 
Cave," — whose omnipresence only indicates how 
easily a good story crosses all frontiers. The popu- 
lar incident of Baron Munchausen, who hung his 
bugle up by the kitchen fire, and the frozen tune 
thawed out, is found in Greece in Plato's time. 



166 QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY. 

Antiphanes, one of Plato's friends, laughingly com- 
pared his writings to a city where the words froze 
in the air as soon as they were pronounced, and 
the next summer, when they were warmed and 
melted by the sun, the people heard what had been 
spoken in the winter. It is only within this cen- 
tury that England and America discovered that 
their nursery-tales were old German and Scandina- 
vian stories ; and now it appears that they came 
from India, and are the property of all the nations 
descended from the Aryan race, and have been 
warbled and babbled between nurses and children 
for unknown thousands of years. 

If we observe the tenacity with which nations ' 
cling to their first types of costume, of architecture, \ 
of tools and methods in tillage, and of decoration, — 
if we learn how old are the patterns of our shawls, 
the capitals of our columns, the fret, the beads, and 
other ornaments on our w^alls, the alternate lotus- 
bud and leaf-stem of our iron fences, — we shall 
think very well of the first men, or ill of the latest. 

I^ow shall we say that only the first men were 
well alive, and the existing generation is invalided 
and degenerate ? Is all literature eavesdropping, 
and aU art Chinese imitation? our life a custom, 
and our body borrowed, like a beggar's dinner, from 
a hundred charities ? A more subtle and severe 
criticism might suggest that some dislocation has 
befallen the race ; that men are off their centre ; 



QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY. 167 

that multitudes of men do not live with Nature, 
but behold it as exiles. People go out to look at 
sunrises and sunsets who do not recognize their 
own quietly and happily, but know that it is foreign 
to them. As they do by books, so they quote the 
sunset and the star, and do not make them theirs. 
Worse yet, they live as foreigners in the world of 
truth, and quote thoughts, and thus disown them. 
Quotatien confesses inferiority. In opening a new 
book we often discover, from the unguarded devo- 
tion with which the writer gives his motto or text, 
all we have to expect from him. If Lord Bacon 
appears already in the preface, I go and read the 
" Instauration " instead of the new book. 

The mischief is quickly punished in general and 
in particular. Admirable mimics have nothing of 
their own. In every kind of parasite, when Nature 
has finished an aphis, a teredo, or a vampire bat, ■ — 
an excellent sucking-pipe to tap another animal, or 
a mistletoe or dodder among plants, — the self-sup- 
plying organs wither and dwindle, as being super- 
fluous. In common prudence there is an early 
limit to this leaning on an original. In literature 
quotation is good only when the writer whom I 
follow goes my way, and, being better mounted 
than I, gives me a cast, as we say ; but if I like 
the gay equipage so well as to go out of my road, I 
had better have gone afoot. 

But it is necessary to remember there are certain 



168 QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY. 

considerations wMcli go far to qualify a reproach 
too grave. This vast mental indebtedness has every 
variety that pecuniary debt has, — every variety of 
merit. The capitalist of either kind is as hungry 
to lend as the consumer to borrow ; and the trans- ' 
action no more indicates intellectual turpitude in 
the borrower than the simple fact of debt in- 
volves bankruptcy. On the contrary, in far the 
greater number of cases the transaction is honor- 
able to both. Can we not help ourselves as dis- 
creetly by the force of two in literature ? Certainly 
it only needs two well placed and well tempered 
for co-operation, to get somewhat far transcending 
any private enterprise ! Shall we converse as 
spies ? Our very abstaining to repeat and credit 
the fine remark of our friend is thievish. Each 
man of thought is surrounded by wiser men than 
he, if they cannot write as well. Cannot he and 
they combine ? Cannot they sink their jealousies 
in God's love, and call their poem Beaumont and 
Fletcher, or the Theban Phalanx's ? The city will 
for nine days or nine years make differences and 
sinister comparisons : there is a new and more ex- 
cellent public that will bless the friends. Nay, it 
is an inevitable fruit of our social nature. The 
child quotes his father, and the man quotes his 
friend. Each man is a hero and an oracle to some- 
body, and to that person whatever he says has an 
enhanced value. Whatever we think and say is 



QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY. 169 

wonderfully better for our spirits and trust in an- 
other mouth. There is none so eminent and wise 
but he knows minds whose opinion confirms or 
qualifies his own : and men of extraordinary genius 
acquire an almost absolute ascendant over their 
nearest companions. The Comte de Crillon said 
one day to M. d'Allonville, with French vivacity, 
" If the universe and I professed one opinion, and 
M. Necker expressed a contrary one, I should be at 
once convinced that the universe and I were mis- 
taken." 

Original power is usually accompanied with as- 
similating power, and we value in Coleridge his 
excellent knowledge and quotations perhaps as 
much, possibly more, than his original suggestions. 
If an author give us just distinctions, inspiring 
lessons, or imaginative poetry, it is not so important 
to us whose they are. If we are fired and guided 
by these, we know him as a benefactor, and shall 
return to him as long as he serves us so well. We 
may like well to know what is Plato's and what is 
Montesquieu's or Goethe's part, and what thought 
was always dear to the writer himself; but the 
worth of the sentences consists in their radiancy 
and equal aptitude to all intelligence. They fit all 
oiir facts like a charm. We respect ourselves the 
more that we know them. 

Next to the originator of a good sentence is the 
first quoter of it. Many will read the book before 



170 QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY. 

one thinks of quoting a passage. As soon as he 
has done this, that line will be quoted east and 
west. Then there are great ways of borrow- 
ing. Genius borrows nobly. When Shakspeare is 
charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies : 
" Yet he was more original than his originals. He 
breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into 
life." And we must thank Karl Ottfried Miiller 
for the just' remark, " Poesy, drawing within its 
circle' all that is glorious and inspiring, gave itself 
but little concern as to where its flowers originally 
grew." So Voltaire usually imitated, but with such 
superiority that Dubuc said : " He is like the false 
Amphitryon ; although the stranger, it is always he 
who has the air of being master of the house." 
Wordsworth, as soon as he heard a good thing, 
caught it up, meditated upon it, aiid very soon re- 
produced it in his conversation and writing. If De 
Quincey said, " That is what I told you," he replied, 
" No : that is mine, — mine, and not yours." On 
the \yhole, we like the valor of it. 'T is on Mar- 
montel's principle, "I pounce on what is mine, 
wherever I find it " ; and on Bacon's broader rule, 
"I take all knowledge to be my province." It be- 
trays the consciousness that truth is the property 
of no individual, but is the treasure of all men. 
And inasmuch as any writer has ascended to a just 
view of man's condition, he has adopted this tone. 
In so far as the receiver's aim is on life, and not 



QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY. 171 

on literature, will be his indifference to the source. 
The nobler the truth or sentiment, the less imports 
the question of authorship. It never troubles the 
simple seeker from whom he derived such or such a 
sentiment. Whoever expresses to us a just thought 
makes ridiculous the pains of the critic who should 
tell him where such a word had been said before. 
" It is no more according to Plato than according to 
me." Truth is always present : it only needs to 
lift the iron lids of the mind's eye to read its ora- 
cles. But the moment there is the purpose of dis- 
play, the fraud is exposed. In fact, it is as difficult 
to appropriate the thoughts of others, as it is to in- 
vent. Always some steep transition, some sudden 
alteration of temperature, of point or of view, betrays 
the foreign interpolation. . 

There is, besides, a new charm in such intellec- 
tual works as, passing through long time, have had 
a multitude of authors and improvers. We admire 
that poetry which no man wrote, — no poet less 
than the genius of humanity itself, — which is to 
be read in a mythology, in the effect of a fixed or 
national style of pictures, of sculptures, or drama, 
or cities, or sciences, on us. Such a poem also is 
language. Every word in the language has once 
been used happily. The ear, caught by that feli- 
city, retains it, and it is used again and again, as if 
the charm belonged to the word, and not to the life 
of thought which so enforced it. These profane 



172 QUOTATION AND OEIGINALITY. 

* 

uses, of course, kill it, and it is avoided. But % 
quick wit can at any time reinforce it, and it corned 
into vogue again. Then people quote so differ-" 
ently : one finding only what is gaudy and popu- 
lar ; another, the heart of the author, the report of 
his select and happiest hour: and the reader some- 
times giving more to the citation than he owes to 
it. Most of the classical citations you shall hear 
or read in the current journals or speeches were 
not drawn from the originals, but from previous 
quotations in English books; and you can easily 
pronounce, from the use and relevancy of the .sen- 
tence, whether it had not done duty many times 
before, — whether your jewel was got from the 
mine or from an auctioneer. We are as much 
informed of a writer's genius by what he selects as 
by what he originates. We read the quotation with 
his eyes, and find a new and fervent sense; as a 
passage from one of the poets, well recited, borrows 
new interest from the rendering. As the journals 
say, " the italics are ours." The profit of books is 
according to the sensibility of the reader. The pro- 
foundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, 
until an equal mind and heart finds and publishes 
it. The passages of Shakspeare that we most prize 
were never quoted until within this century ; and 
Milton's prose, and Burke, even, have their best 
fame within it. Every one, too, remembers his 
friends by their favorite poetry or other reading. 



QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY. 173 

Observe, also, that a writer appears to more ad- 
vantage in the pages of another book than in his 
own. In his own, he waits as a candidate for your 
approbation ; in another's, he is a lawgiver. 

Then another's thoughts have a certain advan- 
tage with ns simply because they are another's. 
There is an illusion in a new phrase. A man hears 
a fine sentence out of Swedenborg, and wonders at 
the wisdom, and is very merry at heart that he has 
now got so fine a thing. Translate it out of the 
new words into his own usual phrase, and he will 
wonder again at his own simplicity, such tricks do 
fine words play with us. 

'T is curious what new interest an old author 
acquires by official canonization in Tiraboschi, or Dr. 
Johnson, or Von Hammer-Purgstall, or Hallam, or 
other historian of literature. Their registration of 
his book, or citation of a passage, carries the senti- 
mental value of a college diploma. Hallam, though 
never profound, is a fair mind, able to appreciate 
poetry, unless it becomes deep, being always blind 
and deaf to imaginative and analogy-loving souls, 
like the Platonists, like Giordano Bruno, like Donne, 
Herbert, Crashaw, and Vaughan ; and Hallam cites 
a sentence from Bacon or Sidney, and distinguishes 
a lyric of Edwards or Yaux, and straightway it 
commends itself to us as if it had received the 
Isthmian crown. 

It is a familiar expedient of brilliant writers, and 



174 QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY. 

not less of witty talkers, the device of ascribing 
their own sentence to an imaginary person, dn order 
to give it weight, — as Cicero, Cowley, Swift, Lan- 
dor, and Carlyle have done. And Cardinal de Eetz, 
at a critical moment in the Parliament of Paris, 
described himself in an extemporary Latin sentence, 
which he pretended to quote from a classic author, 
and which told admirably well. It is a curious 
reflex effect of this enhancement of our thought by 
citing it from another, that many men can write 
better under a mask than for themselves, — as 
Chatterton in archaic ballad, Le Sage in Spanish 
costume, Macpherson as '' Ossian," — and, I doubt 
not, many a young barrister in chambers in London, 
who forges good thunder for the " Times," but never 
works as well under his own name. This is a sort 
of dramatizing talent ; as it is not rare to find great 
powers of recitation, without the least original elo- 
quence, — or people who copy drawings with admi- 
rable skill, but are incapable of any design. 

In hours of high mental activity we sometimes 
do the book too much honor, reading out of it bet- 
ter things than the author wrote, — reading, as we 
say, between the lines. You have had the like ex- 
perience in conversation : the wit was in what you 
heard, not in what the speakers said. Our best 
thought came from others. We heard in their words 
a deeper sense than the speakers put into them, and 
could express ourselves in other people's phrases to 



QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY. 175 

finer purpose than tliey knew. In Moore's Diary, 
Mr. Hallam is reported as mentioning at dinner one 
0/ his friends who had said, " I don't know how 
. it is, a thing that falls flat from me seems quite 
an excellent joke when given at second-hand by 
Sheridan. I never like my own hon-mots until he 
adopts them." Dumont was exalted by being used 
by Mirabeau, by Bentham, and by Sir Philip Fran- 
cis, who, again, was less than his own " Junius " ; 
and James Hogg (except in his poems " Kilmeny " 
and "The Witch of Fife") is but a third-rate author, 
owing his fame to his efiigy colossalized through 
the lens of John Wilson, — who, again, writes bet- 
ter under the domino of "Christopher ^N'orth" than 
in his proper clothes. The bold theory of Delia 
Bacon, that Shakspeare's plays were written by 
a society of wits, — by Sir Walter Ealeigh, Lord 
Bacon, and others around the Earl of Southamp- 
ton, — had plainly for her the charm of the supe- 
rior meaning they would acquire when read under 
this light; this idea of the authorship controlling 
our appreciation of the works themselves. We 
once knew a man overjoyed at the notice of his 
pamphlet in a leading newspaper. What range 
he gave his imagination ! Who could have writ- 
ten it? Was it not Colonel Carbine, or Senator 
Tonitrus, or, at the least. Professor Maximilian? 
Yes, he could detect in the style that fine Eoman 
hand. How it seemed the very voice of the refined 



176 QUOTATION AND OEIGINALITT. 

and discerning public,' inviting merit at last to 
consent to fame, and come up and take place in 
the reserved and authentic chairs ! He carried the 
journal with haste to the sympathizing Cousin 
Matilda, who is so proud of all we do. But what 
dismay, when the good Matilda, pleased with his 
pleasure, confessed she had written the criticism, 
and carried it with her own hands to the post- 
office ! "Mr. Wordsworth," said Charles Lamb, 
" allow me to introduce to you my only admirer." 

Swedenborg threw a formidable theory into the 
world, that every soul existed in a society of souls, 
from which all its thoughts passed into it, as the 
blood of the mother circulates in her unborn child ; 
and he noticed that, when in his bed, — alternately 
sleeping and waking, — sleeping, he was surrounded 
by persons disputing and offering opinions on the 
one side and on the other side of a proposition; 
waking, the like suggestions occurred for and 
against the proposition as his own thoughts ; sleep- 
ing again, he saw and heard the speakers as before : 
and this as often as he slept or waked. And if we 
expand the image, does it not look as if we men 
were thinking and talking out of an enormous an- 
tiquity, as if we stood, not in a coterie of prompters 
that filled a sitting-room, but in a circle of intel- 
ligences that reached through all thinkers, poets, 
inventors, and wits, men and women, English, Ger- 
man, Celt, Aryan, Mnevite, Copt, — back to the 



QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY. 177 

first geometer, bard, mason, carpenter, planter, shep- 
herd, — back to the first negro, who, with more 
health or better perception, gave a shriller sound or 
nanie for the thing he saw and dealt with ? Our 
benefactors are as many as the children who in- 
vented speech, word by word. Language is a city, 
to the building of which every human being brought 
a stone ; yet he is no more to be credited with the 
grand result than the acaleph which adds a cell to 
the coral reef which is the basis of the continent. 

ndvra pel: all things are in flux. It is inevita- 
ble that you are indebted to the past. You are fed 
and formed by it. The old forest is decomposed for 
the composition of the new forest. The old ani- 
mals have given their bodies to the earth to furnish 
through chemistry the forming race, and every in- 
dividual is only a momentary fixation of what was 
yesterday another's, is to-day his, and will belong 
to a third to-morrow. So it is in thought. Our 
knowledge is the amassed thought and experience 
of innumerable minds : our language, our science, 
our religion, our opinions, our fancies we inherited. 
Our country, customs, laws, our ambitions, and our 
.notions of fit and fair, — all these we never made ; 
we found them ready-made; we but quote them. 
Goethe frankly said, " What would remain to me if 
this art of appropriation were derogatory to genius ? 
Every one of my writings has been furnished to me 
by a thousand different persons, a thousand things : 



178 - QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY. 

wise and foolish have brought me, without suspect- 
ing it, the offering of their thoughts, faculties, and 
experience. My work is an aggregation of beings 
taken from the whole of nature ; it bears the name 
of Goethe." 

But there remains the indefeasible persistency of 
the individual to be himself. One leaf, one blade 
of grass, one meridian, does not resemble another. 
Every mind is different ; and the more it is un- 
folded, the more pronounced is that difference. He 
must draw the elements into him for food, and, if • 
they be granite and silex, will prefer them cooked 
by sun and rain, by time and art, to his hand. But, 
however received, these elements pass into the sub- 
stance of his constitution, will be assimilated, and 
tend always to form, not a partisan, but a possessor 
of truth. To all that can be said of the prepon- 
derance of the Past, the single word Genius is a 
sufficient reply. The divine resides in the new. 
The divine never quotes, but is, and creates. The 
profound apprehension of the Present is Genius, 
which makes the Past forgotten. Genius believes 
its faintest presentiment against the testimony of 
all history ; for it knows that facts are not ulti- 
mates, but that a state of mind is the ancestor of 
everything. And what is Originality ? It is being, 
being one's self, and reporting accurately what we see 
and are. Genius is, in the first instance, sensibility, 
the capacity of receiving just impressions from the 



QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY. 179 

external world, and the power of co-ordinating these 
after the laws of thought. It implies Will, or origi- 
nal force, for their right distribution and expression. 
If to this the sentiment of piety be added, if the 
thinker feels that the thought most strictly his own 
is not his own, and recognizes the perpetual sugges- 
tion of the Supreme Intellect, the oldest thoughts 
become new and fertile whilst he speaks them. 

Originals never lose their value. There is always 
in them a style and weight of speech, which the im- 
manence of the oracle bestowed, and which cannot 
be counterfeited. Hence the permanence of the 
high poets. Plato, Cicero, and Plutarch cite the 
poets in the manner in which Scripture is quoted 
in our churches. A phrase or a single word is 
adduced, with honoring emphasis, from Pindar, 
Hesiod, or Euripedes, as precluding all argument, 
because thus had they said : importing that the 
bard spoke not his own, but the words of some god. 
True poets have always ascended to this lofty 
platform, and met this expectation. Shakspeare, 
Milton, Wordsworth, were very conscious of their 
responsibilities. When a man thinks happily, he 
finds no foot-track in the field he traverses. All 
spontaneous thought is irrespective of all else. 
Pindar uses this haughty defiance, as if it were 
impossible to find his sources : " There are many 
swift darts within my quiver, which have a voice 
for those .with understanding ; but to the crowd 



180 QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY. 

they need interpreters. He is gifted with genius 
who knoweth much by natural talent." 

Our pleasure in seeing each mind take the sub- 
ject to which it has a proper right is seen fn mere 
fitness in time. He that comes second must needs 
quote him that comes first. The earliest describers 
of savage life, as Captain Cook's account of the 
Society Islands, or Alexander Henry's travels among 
our Indian tribes, have a charm of truth and just 
point of view. Landsmen and sailors freshly come 
from the most civilized countries, and with no false 
expectation, no sentimentality yet about wild life, 
healthily receive and report what they saw, — see- 
ing what they must, and using no choice ; and no 
man suspects the superior merit of the description, 
until Chateaubriand, or Moore, or Campbell, or By- 
ron, or the artists arrive, and mix so much art Avith 
their picture that the incomparable advantage of 
the first narrative appears. For the same reason we 
dislike that the poet should choose an antique or 
far-fetched subject for his muse, as if he avowed 
want of insight. The great deal always with the 
nearest. Only as braveries of too prodigal power 
can we pardon it, when the life of genius is so 
redundant that out of petulance it flings its fire 
into some old mummy, and, lo ! it walks and 
blushes again here in the street. 

We cannot overstate our debt to the Past, but 
the moment has the supreme claim. The Past is 



QUOTATION AND ORIGINALITY. 181 

for us; but the sole terms on which it can be- 
come ours are its subordination to the Present. 
Only an inventor knows how to borrow, and every 
man is or should be an inventor. We must not 
tamper with the organic motion of the soul. 'T is 
certain that thought has its own proper motion, and 
the hints which flash from it, the words overheard 
at unawares by the free mind, are trustworthy and 
fertile, when obeyed, and not perverted to low and 
selfish account. This vast memory is only raw 
material. The divine gift is ever the instant life, 
which receives and uses and creates, and can well 
bury the old in the omnipotency with which I^ature 
decomposes all her harvest for recomposition. 



PEOGRESS OF CULTURE. 



PROGRESS OF CULTURE. 

Address eead before the $ B K Society at Cambridge, 
July 18, 1867. 

We meet to-day under happy omens to our an- 
cient society, to the commonwealth of letters, to 
the country, and to mankind. 'No good citizen but 
shares the wonderful prosperity of the Federal 
Union. The heart still beats with the public pulse 
of joy, that -the country has withstood the rude 
trial which threatened its existence, and thrills with 
the vast augmentation of strength which it draws 
from this proof. The storm which has been re- 
sisted is a crown of honor and a pledge of strength 
to the ship. We may be well contented with our 
fair inheritance. Was ever such coincidence of ad- 
vantages in time and place as in America to-day ? 
— the fusion of races and religions ; the hungry 
cry for men which goes up from the wide conti- 
nent; the answering facility of immigration, per- 
mitting every wanderer to choose his climate and 
government. Men come hither by nations. Sci- 
ence surpasses the old miracles of mythology, to 
^y_ with them over the sea, and to send their mes- 



186 PROGRESS OF CULTURE. 

sages under it. They come from crowded, anti- 
quated kingdoms to the easy sharing of our simple 
forms. Land without price is offered to the settler, 
cheap education to his children. The temper of 
our people delights in this whirl of life. Who 
would live in the stone age, or the bronze, or the 
iron, or the lacustrine ? Who does not prefer the 
age of steel, of gold, of coal, petroleum, cotton, 
steam, electricity, and the spectroscope ? 

*' Prisca juvent alios, ego me nunc denique natum 

Gratulor." 

All this activity has added to the value of life, and 
to the scope of the intellect. I will not say that 
American institutions have given a new enlarge- 
ment to our idea of a finished man, but they have 
added important features to the sketch. 

Observe the marked ethical quality of the inno- 
vations urged or adopted. The new claim of woman 
to a political status is itself an honorable testimony, 
to the civilization which has given her a civil 
status new in history. Now that, by the increased 
humanity of law she controls her property, she in- 
evitably takes the next step to her share in power. 
The war gave us the aboKtion of slavery, the suc- 
cess of the Sanitary Commission and of the Freed- 
men's Bureau. Add to these the new scope of 
social science ; the abolition of capital punishment 
and of imprisonment for debt ; the improvement of 
prisons ; the efforts for the suppression of intern- 



PROGEESS OF CULTURE. 187 

perance; the search for just rules affecting labor; 
the co-operative societies ; the insurance of life and 
limb; the free-trade league; the improved alms- 
houses; the enlarged scale of charities to relieve 
local famine, or burned towns, or the suffering 
Greeks; the incipient series of international con- 
gresses, — all, one may say, in a high degree revo- 
lutionary, — teaching nations the taking of govern- 
ment into their own hands, and superseding kings. 

The spirit is new. A silent revolution has im- 
pelled, step by step, all this activity. A great 
many full-blown conceits have burst. The cox- 
comb goes to the wall. To his astonishment he has 
found that this country and this age belong to the 
most liberal persuasion ; that the day of ruling by 
scorn and sneers is past ; that good sense is now in 
power, and that resting on a vast constituency of 
intelligent labor, and, better yet, on perceptions less 
and less dim of laws the most sublime. Men are 
now to be astonished by seeing acts of good-nature, 
common civility, and Christian charity proposed by 
statesmen, and executed by justices of the peace, — 
by policemen and the constable. The fop is unable 
to cut the patriot in the street ; nay, he lies at his 
mercy in the ballot of the club. 

Mark, too, the large resources of a statesman, of 
a socialist, of a scholar, in this age. When classes 
are exasperated against each other, the peace of the 
world is always kept by striking a new note. In- 



188 PEOGRESS OF CULTUEE. 

stantly the units part, and form in a new order, and 
those who were opposed are now side by side. In 
this country the prodigious mass of work that must 
be done has either made new divisions of labor or 
created new professions. Consider, at this time, 
what variety of issues, of enterprises public and 
private, what genius of science, what of administra- 
tion, what of practical skill, what masters, each in 
his several province, the railroad, the telegraph, the 
mines, the inland and marine explorations, the 
novel and powerful philanthropies, as well as agri- 
culture, the foreign trade and the home trade 
(whose circuits in this country are as spacious as 
the foreign), manufactures, the very inventions, all 
on, a national scale too, have evoked! — all imply- 
ing the appearance of gifted men, the rapid ad- 
dition to our society of a class of true nobles, by 
which the self-respect of each town and State is 
enriched. 

Take as a type the boundless freedom here in 
Massachusetts. People have in all countries been 
burned and stoned for saying things which are 
commonplaces at all our breakfast-tables. Every 
one who was in Italy twenty-five years ago will re- 
member the caution with which his host or guest, 
in any house looked around him, if a political topic 
were broached. Here the tongue is free, and the 
hand ; and the freedom of action goes to the brink, 
if not over the brink, of license. 



PROGRESS OF CULTURE. 189 

. A controlling influence of the times has been 
the wide and successful study of ISTatural Science. 
Steffens said, " The religious opinions of men rest 
on their views of nature." Great strides have been 
made within the present century. Geology, as- 
tronomy, chemistry, optics, have yielded grand 
results. The correlation of forces and the polariza- 
tion of light have carried us to sublime generaliza- 
tions, — have affected an imaginative race like poetic 
inspirations. We have been taught to tread famil- 
iarly on giddy heights of thought, and to wont 
ourselves to daring conjectures. The narrow sec- 
tarian cannot read astronomy with impunity. The 
creeds of his church shrivel like dried leaves at the 
door of the observatory, and a new and healthful 
air regenerates the human mind, and imparts a sym- 
pathetic enlargement to its inventions and method. 
That cosmical we^st-wind which, meteorologists tell 
us, constitutes, by the revolution of the globe, the 
upper current, is alone broad enough to carry to 
every city and suburb — to the farmer's house, 
the miner's shanty, and the fisher's boat — the in- 
spirations of this new hope of mankind. Now, if 
any one say we have had enough of these boastful 
recitals, then T say, Happy is the land wherein 
benefits like these have grown trite and common- 
place. 

We confess that in America everything looks 
new and recent. Our towns are still rude, — the 



190 PROGRESS OF CULTURE. 

make-shifts of emigrants, — and the whole archi- 
tecture tent-like, when compared with the monu- 
mental solidity of mediaeval and primeval remains 
in Europe and Asia. But geology has effaced these 
distinctions. Geology, a science of forty or fifty 
summers, has had the effect to throw an air of 
novelty and mushroom speed over entire history. 
The oldest empires, — what we called venerable 
antiquity, — now that we have true measures of 
duration, show like creations of yesterday. 'T is 
yet quite too early to draw sound conclusions. The 
old six thousand years of chronology become a 
kitchen clock, — no more a measure of time than 
an hour-glass or an egg-glass, — since the duration 
of geologic periods has come into view. Geology 
itself is only chemistry with the element of time 
added ; and the rocks of ISTahant or the dikes of the 
White Hills disclose that the world is a crystal, 
and the soil of the valleys and plains a continual 
decomposition and recomposition. Nothing is old 
but the mind. 

But I find, not only this equality between new " 
and old countries, as seen by the eye of science, 
but also a certain equivalence of the ages of his- 
tory; and as the child is in his playthings work- 
ing incessantly at problems of natural philoso- 
phy, — working as hard and as successfully as 
Newton, — so it were ignorance not to see that 
each nation and period has done its full part to 



PROGRESS OF CULTURE. 191 

make up the result of existing civility. We are all 
agreed that we have not on the instant better men 
to show than Plutarch's heroes. The world is al- 
ways equal to itself. We cannot yet afford to drop 
Homer, nor u^Eschylus, nor Plato, nor Aristotle, nor 
Archimedes. Later, each European nation, after 
the breaking up of the Eoman Empire, had its ro- 
mantic era, and the productions of that era in each 
rose to about the same height. Take for an exam- 
ple in literature the Romance of Arthur, in Brit- 
ain, or in the opposite province of Brittany; the 
Chansons de Roland, in France ; the Chronicle of 
the Cid, in Spain ; the Niebelungen Lied, in Germa- 
ny ; the Norse Sagas, in Scandinavia ; and, I may 
add, the Arabian Nights, on the African coast. But 
if these works still survive and multiply, what shall 
we say of names more distant, or hidden through 
their very superiority to their coevals, — names of 
men who have left remains that certify a height of 
genius in their several directions not since sur- 
passed, and which men in proportion to their wis- 
dom still cherish, — as Zoroaster, Confucius, and 
the grand scriptures, only recently known to West- 
ern nations, of the Indian Vedas, the Institutes of 
Menu, the Puranas,^ the poems of the Mahabarat 
and the Eamayana ? 

In modern Europe, the Middle Ages were called 
the Dark Ages. Who dares to call them so now ? 
They are seen to be the feet on which we walk, the 



192 PROGRESS OF CULTURE. 

eyes with which we see. 'T is one of our triumphs 
to have reinstated them. Their Dante and Alfred 
and Wickliffe and Abelard and Bacon ; their Magna 
Charta, decimal numbers, mariner's compass, gun- 
powder, glass, paper, and clocks ; chemistry, algebra, 
astronomy; their Gothic architecture, their paint- 
ing, — are the delight and tuition of ours. Six 
hundred years ago Eoger Bacon explained the pre- 
cession of the equinoxes, and the necessity of reform 
in the calendar ; looking over how many horizons 
as far as into Liverpool and ^NTew York, he an- 
nounced that machines can be constructed to drive 
ships more rapidly than a whole galley of rowers 
could do, nor would they need anything but a pilot 
to steer ; carriages, to move with incredible speed, 
without aid of animals; and machines to fly into 
the air like birds. Even the races that we still call 
savage or semi-savage, and which preserve their arts 
from immemorial traditions, vindicate their faculty 
by the skill with which they make their yam- 
cloths, pipes, bows, boats, and carved war-clubs. 
The war-proa of the Malays in the Japanese waters 
struck Commodore Perry by its close resemblance 
to the yacht "America." 

As we find thus a certain equivalence in the 
ages, there is also an equipollence of individual 
genius to the nation which it represents. It is a 
curious fact, that a certain enormity of culture 
makes a man invisible to his contemporaries. 'T is 



PROGRESS OF CULTURE. 193 

always hard to go beyond your public. If they are 
satisfied with cheap performance, you will not 
easily arrive at better. If they know what is good, 
and require it, you will aspire and burn until you 
achieve it. But, from time to time, in history, men 
are born a whole age to© soon. The founders of 
nations, the wise men and inventors, who shine af- 
terwards as their gods, were probably martyrs in 
their own time. All the transcendent writers and 
artists of the world, — 't is doubtful who they were, 
— they are lifted so fast into mythology, • — Homer, 
Menu, Viasa, Daedalus, Hermes, Zoroaster, even 
Swedenborg and Shakspeare. The early names 
are too typical, — Homer, or hlind man ; Menu, or 
man ; Yiasa, compiler ; Daedalus, cunning ; Hermes, 
interjpreter ; and so on. Probably, the men were so 
great, so self-fed, that the recognition of them by 
others was not necessary to them. And every one 
has heard the remark (too often, I fear, politely 
made), that the philosopher was above his audience. 
I think I have seen two or three great men who, 
for that reason, were of no account among scholars. 

But Jove is in his reserves. The truth, the hope 
of any time, must alw^ays be sought in the mi- 
norities. Michel Angelo was the conscience of 
Italy. We grow free with his name, and find it 
ornamental now ; but in his own days, his friends 
were few ; and you would need to hunt him in a 
conventicle with the Methodists of the era, name- 

9 . M 



194 PROGRESS OF CULTURE. 

ly, Savonarola, Yittoria Colonna, Contarini, Pole, 
Occhino, — superior souls, the religious of that day, 
drawn to each other, and under some cloud with 
the rest of the world, — reformers, the radicals of 
the hour, banded against the corruptions of Eome, 
and as lonely and as hated as Dante before them. 

I find the single mind equipollent to a multitude 
of minds, say to a nation of minds, as a drop of wa- 
ter balances the sea ; and under this view the prob- 
lem of culture assumes wonderful interest. Culture 
implies all which gives the mind possession of its 
own powers ; as languages to the critic, telescope to 
the astronomer. Culture alters the political status 
of an individual. It raises a rival royalty in a mon- 
archy. 'T is king against king. It is ever the ro- 
mance of history in all dynasties, — the co-presence 
of the revolutionary force in intellect. It creates a 
personal independence which the monarch cannot 
look down, and to which he must often succumb. 
If a man know the laws of nature better than other 
men, his nation cannot spare him ; nor if he know 
the power of numbers, the secret of geometry, of 
algebra, on which the computations of astronomy, 
of navigation, of machinery, rest. If he can con- 
verse better than any other, he rules the minds of 
men wherever he goes ; if he has imagination, he 
intoxicates men. If he has wit, he tempers despot- 
ism by epigrams : a song, a satire, a sentence, has 
played its part in great events. Eloquence a hun- 



PROGRESS OF CULTURE. 195 

dred times has turned the scale of war and peace at 
will. The history of Greece is at one time reduced 
to two persons, — Philip, or the successor of Philip, 
on one side, and Demosthenes, a private citizen, on 
the other. If he has a military genius, like Beli- 
sarius, or administrative faculty, like Chatham or 
Bismarck, he is the king's king. If a theologian of 
deep convictions and strong understanding carries 
his country with him, like Luther, the state be- 
comes Lutheran, in spite of the Emperor, as Thomas 
k Becket overpowered the English Henry. Wit has 
a great charter. Popes and kings and Councils of 
Ten are very sharp with their censorships and in- 
quisitions, hut it is on dull people. Some Dante 
or Angelo, Eabelais, Hafiz, Cervantes, Erasmus, 
Beranger, Bettine von Arnim, or whatever genuine 
wit of the old inimitable, class, is always allowed. 
Kings feel that this is that which they themselves 
represent; this is no red-kerchiefed, red-shirted 
rebel, but loyalty, kingship. This is real kingship, 
and their own only titular. Even manners are a 
distinction, which, we sometimes see, are not to be 
overborne by rank or official power, or even by 
other eminent talents, since they too proceed from 
a certain deep innate perception of fit and fair. 

It is too plain that a cultivated laborer is worth 
many untaught laborers ; that a scientific engineer, 
with instruments and steam, is worth many hun- 
dred men, many thousands ; that Archimedes or 



196 PROGRESS OF CULTURE. 

ISTapoleon is worth for labor a thousand thousands; 
and that in every wise and genial soul we have 
England, Greece, Italy, walking, and can dispense 
with populations of navvies. 

Literary history and all history is a record of 
the power of minorities, and of minorities of one. 
Every book is written with a constant secret ref- 
erence to the few intelligent persons whom the 
writer believes to exist in the million. The artist 
has always the masters in his eye, though he affect 
to flout them. Michel Angelo is thinking of Da 
Vinci, and Eaffaelle is thinking of Michel Angelo. 
Tennyson would give his fame for a verdict in his 
favor from Wordsworth. Agassiz and Owen and 
Huxley affect to address the American and Eng- 
lish people, but are really writing to each other. 
Everett dreamed of Webster. McKay, the ship- 
builder, thinks of George Steers; and Steers, of 
Pook, the naval constructor. The names of the 
masters at the head of each department of sci- 
ence, art, or function are often little known to the 
world, but are always known to the adepts; as 
Eobert Brown in botany, and Gauss in mathe- 
matics. Often the master is a hidden man, but 
not to the true student ; invisible to all the rest, 
resplendent to him. All his own work and cul- 
ture form the eye to see the master. In politics, 
mark the importance of minorities of one, as of 
Phocion, Cato, Lafayette, Arago. The ^ importance 



PROGRESS OF CULTURE. 197 

of the one person who has the truth over nations 
who have it not, is because power obeys reality, 
and not appearance ; according to quality, and not 
quantity. How much more are men than nations ! 
the wise and good souls, the stoics in Greece and 
Eome, Socrates in Athens, the saints in Judaea, 
Alfred the king, Shakspeare the poet, Newton the 
philosopher, the perceiver, and obeyer of truth, — 
than the foolish and sensual millions around them ! 
so that, wherever a true man appears, everything 
usually reckoned great dwarfs itself ; he is the only 
great event, and it is easy to lift him into a mytho- 
logical personage. 

Then the next step in the series is the equiva- 
lence of the soul to nature. I said that one of 
the distinctions of our century has been the devo- 
tion of cultivated men to natural science. The 
benefits thence derived to the arts and to civili- 
zation are signal and immense. They are felt in 
navigation, in agriculture, in manufactures, in as- 
tronomy, in mining, and in war. But over all 
their utilities, I must hold their chief value to be 
metaphysical. The chief value is not the useful 
powers he obtained, but the test it has been of 
the scholar. He has accosted this immeasurable 
nature, and got clear answers. He understood 
what he read. He found agreement with himself. 
It taught him anew the reach of the human mind, 
and that it was citizen of the universe. 



198 PEOGKESS OF CULTURE. 

f The first quality we know in matter is centrality, 
— we call it gravity, — which holds the universe 
together, which remains pure and indestructible in 
each mote, as in masses and planets, and from 
each atom rays out illimitable influence. To this 
material essence answers Truth, in the intellectual 
world, — Truth, whose centre is everywhere, and its 
circumference nowhere, wdiose existence we cannot 
disimagine, — the soundness and health of things, 
against which no blow can be struck but it recoils 
on the striker, — Truth, on whose side we always 
heartily are. And the first measure of a mind is 
its centrality, its capacity of truth, and its adhesion 
to it. 

When the correlation of the sciences was an- 
nounced by Oersted and his colleagues, it was no 
surprise ; we were found already prepared for it. 
The fact stated accorded with the auguries or divi- 
nations of the human mind. Thus, if we should 
analyze I^ewton's discovery, we should say that 
if it had not been anticipated by him, it would not 
have been found. We are told that, in posting 
his books, after the French had measured on the 
earth a degree of the meridian, when he saw that 
his theoretic results were approximating that em- 
pirical one, his hand shook, the figures danced, and 
he was so agitated that he was forced to call in 
an assistant to finish the computation. Why agi- 
tated? — but because, when he saw, in the fall of 



PROGRESS OF CULTURE. 199 

an apple to the ground, the fall of the earth to the. 
sun, of the sun and of all suns to the centre, that 
perception was accompanied by the spasm of delight 
by which the intellect greets a fact more immense 
still, a fact really universal, — holding in intellect 
as in matter, in morals as in intellect, — that atom 
draws to atom throughout nature, and truth to 
truth throughout spirit ? His law was only a par- 
ticular of the more universal law of centrality. 
Every law in nature, as gravity, centripetence, re- 
pulsion, polarity, undulation, has a counterpart in 
the intellect. The laws above are sisters of the 
laws below. Shall we study the mathematics of 
the sphere, and not its causal essence also ? Na- 
ture is a fable, whose moral blazes through it. 
There is no use in Copernicus, if the robust perio- 
dicity of the solar system does not show its equal 
perfection in the mental sphere, — the periodicity, 
the Compensatory errors, the grand reactions. I 
shall never believe that centrifugence and centri- 
petence balance, unless mind heats and meliorates, 
as well as the surface and soil of the globe. 

On this power, this all-dissolving unity, the em- 
phasis of heaven and earth is laid. E'ature is brute 
but as this soul quickens it; Nature always the 
effect, mind the flowing cause. Nature, we find, 
is ever as is our sensibility; it is hostile to igno- 
rance ; — plastic, transparent, delightful, to knowl- 
edge. Mind carries the law; history is the slow 



200 PEOGKESS OF CULTURE. 

and atomic unfolding. All things admit of this 
extended sense, and the universe at last is only 
prophetic, or, shall we say, symptomatic, of vaster 
interpretation and results. Nature an enormous 
system, but in mass and in particle curiously avail- 
able to the humblest need of the little creature 
that walks on the earth ! The immeasurableness 
of Nature is not more astounding than his power 
to gather all her omnipotence into a manageable 
rod or wedge, bringing it to a hair-point for the 
eye and hand of the philosopher. 

Here stretches out of sight, out of conception 
even, this vast Nature,- daunting, bewildering, but 
all penetrable, all self-similar, — an unbroken unity, 
— and the mind of man is a key to the whole. 
He finds that the universe, as Newton said, " was 
made at one cast " ; the mass is like the atom, — 
the same chemistry, gravity, and conditions. The 
asteroids are the chips of an old star, and a mete- 
oric stone is a chip of an asteroid. As language 
is in the alphabet, so is entire Nature — the play 
of all its laws — in one atom. The good wit finds 
the law from a single observation, — the law, and 
its limitations, and its correspondences, — as the 
farmer finds his cattle by a footprint. " State the 
sun, and you state the planets, and conversely." 

Whilst its power is offered to his hand, its laws 
to his science, not less its beauty speaks to his 
taste, imagination, and sentiment. Nature is sana- 



PROGRESS OF CULTURE. 201 

tive, refining, elevating. How cunningly she hides 
every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity un- 
der roses, and violets, and morning dew ! Every 
inch of the mountains is scarred by unimaginable 
convulsions, yet the new day is purple with the 
bloom of youth and love. Look out into the July 
night, and see the broad belt of silver flame which 
flashes up the half of heaven, fresh and delicate 
as the bonfires of the meadow-flies. Yet the pow- 
ers of numbers cannot compute its enormous age, 
— lasting as space and time, — embosomed in time 
and space. And time and space, — what are they ? 
Our first problems, which we ponder all our lives 
through, and leave where we found them; whose 
outrunning immensity, the old Greeks believed, 
astonished the gods themselves; of whose dizzy 
vastitudes all the worlds of God are a mere dot 
on the margin ; impossible to deny, impossible to 
believS: Yet the moral element in man counter- 
poises this dismaying immensity, and bereaves it 
of terror. The highest flight to which the muse 
of Horace ascended was in that triplet of lines in 
which he described the souls which can calmly 
confront the sublimity of nature : — 

" Hunc solem, et stellas, et decedentia certis 
Tempora momentis, sunt qui formidine nulla 
Imbuti spectant." 

The sublime point of experience is the value of 
a suf&cient man. Cube this value by the meeting 



202 PROGRESS OF CULTURE. 

of two such, — of two or more such, — who under- 
stand and support each other, and. you have organ- 
ized victory. At any time, it only needs the con- 
temporaneous appearance of a few superior and at- 
tractive men to give a new and noble turn to the 
public mind. 

The benefactors we have indicated were excep- 
tional men, and great because exceptional. The 
question which the present age urges with increas- 
ing emphasis, day by day, is, whether the high 
qualities which distinguished them can be im- 
parted ? The poet Wordsworth asked, " What one 
is, why may not millions be ? " Why not ? Knowl- 
edge exists to be imparted. Curiosity is lying in 
wait for every secret. The inquisitiveness of the 
child to hear runs to meet the eagerness of the 
parent to explain. The air does not rush to fill a 
vacuum with such speed as the mind to catch the 
expected fact. Every artist was first an amateur. 
The ear outgrows the tongue, is sooner ripe and 
perfect ; but the tongue is always learning to say 
what the ear has taught it, and the hand obeys the 
same lesson. 

There is anything but humiliation in the homage 
men pay to a great man ; it is sympathy, love of 
the same things, effort to reach them, — the expres- 
sion of their hope of what they shall become, when 
the obstructions of their mal-formation and mal- 
education shall be trained away. Great men shall 



PROGRESS OF CULTURE. 203 

not impoverish, but enricli us. Great men, — the 
age goes on their credit ; but all the rest, when 
their wires are continued, and not cut, can do as 
signal things, and in new parts of nature. " No an- 
gel in his heart acknowledges any one superior to 
himself but the Lord alone." There is not a person 
here present to whom omens that should astonish 
have not predicted his future, have not uncovered 
his past. The dreams of the night supplement by 
their divination the imperfect experiments of the 
day. Every soliciting instinct is only a hint of a 
coming fact, as the air and water that hang invis- 
ibly around us hasten to become solid in the oak 
and the animal. But the recurrence to high seurces 
is rare. In our daily intercourse, we go with the 
crowd, lend ourselves to low fears and hopes, be- 
come the victims of our own arts and implements, 
and disuse our resort to the Divine oracle. It is 
only in the sleep of the soul that we help ourselves 
by so many ingenious crutches and machineries. 
What is the use of telegraphs ? What of news- 
papers? To know in each social crisis how men 
feel in Kansas, in California, the wise man waits 
for no mails, reads no telegrams. He asks his own 
heart. If they are made as he is, if they breathe 
the like air, eat of the same wheat, have wives and 
children, he knows that their joy or resentment 
rises to the same point as his own. The inviolate 
soul is in perpetual telegraphic communication with 



204 PROGRESS OF CULTURE. 

the Source of events, has earlier information, a pri- 
vate despatch, which relieves him of the terror 
which presses on the rest of the community. 

The foundation of culture, as of character, is at 
last the moral sentiment. This is the fountain of 
power, preserves its eternal newness, draws its own 
rent out of every novelty in science. Science cor- 
rects th.Q old creeds ; sweeps away, with every new 
perception, our infantile catechisms ; and necessi- 
tates a faith commensurate with the grander orbits 
and universal laws which it discloses. Yet it does 
not surprise the moral sentiment. That was older, 
and awaited expectant these larger insights. 

The affections are the wings by which the intel- 
lect launches on the void, and is borne across it. 
Great love is the inventor and expander of the 
frozen powers, the feathers frozen to our sides. It 
was the conviction of Plato, of Yan Helmont, of 
Pascal, of Swedenborg, that piety is an essential 
condition of science, that great thoughts come from 
the heart. It happens sometimes that poets do not 
believe their own poetry ; they are so much the less 
poets. But great men are sincere. Great men are they 
who see that spiritual is stronger than any material 
force, that thoughts rule the world. No hope so bright 
but is the beginning of its own fulfilment. Every 
generalization shows the way to a larger. Men say, 
Ah ! if a man could impart his talent, instead of 
his performance, what mountains of guineas would 



PROGRESS OF CULTURE. 205 

be paid ! Yes, but in the measure of his absolute 
veracity he does impart it. When he does not play 
a part, does not wish to sliine, when he talks to 
men with the unrestrained frankness which children 
use with each other, he communicates himself, and 
not his vanity. All vigor is contagious, and when 
we see creation we also begin to create. Depth of 
character, height of genius, can only find nourish- 
ment in this soil. The miracles of genius always 
rest on profound convictions which refuse to be an- 
alyzed. Enthusiasm is the leaping lightning, not to 
be measured by the horse-power of the understand- 
ing. Hope never spreads her golden wings but on 
unfathomable seas. The same law holds for the in- 
tellect as for the will. When the will is absolutely 
surrendered to the moral sentiment, that is virtue ; 
when the wit is surrendered to intellectual truth, 
that is genius. Talent for talent's sake is a bauble 
and a show. Talent working with joy in the cause 
of universal truth lifts the possessor to new power 
as a benefactor. I know veil to what assembly of 
educated, reflecting, successful, and powerful persons 
I speak. Yours is the part of those who have re- 
ceived much. It is an old legend of just men. 
Noblesse oblige ; or, superior advantages bind you to 
larger generosity. Now I conceive that, in this 
economical world, where every drop and every 
crumb is husbanded, the transcendent powers of 
mind were not meant to be misused. The Divine 



206 PROGRESS OF CULTURE. 

!N"atiire carries on its administration by good men. 
Here you are set down, scholars and idealists, as in 
a barbarous age ; amidst insanity, to calm and guide 
it ; amidst fools and blind, to see the right done ; 
among violent proprietors, to check self-interest, 
stone-blind and stone-deaf, by considerations of hu- 
manity to the workman and to his child; amongst 
angry politicians swelling with self-esteem, pledged 
to parties, pledged to clients, you are to make valid 
the large considerations of equity and good sense ; 
under bad governments, to force on them, by your 
persistence, good laws. Around that immovable 
persistency of yours, statesmen, legislatures, must 
revolve, denying you, but not less forced to obey. 

We wish to put the ideal rules into practice, to 
offer liberty instead of chains, and see whether 
liberty will not disclose its proper checks ; believ- 
ing that a free press will prove safer than the cen- 
sorship; to ordain free trade, and believe that it 
will not bankrupt us ; universal suffrage, believing 
that it will not carry us to mobs, or back to kings 
again. I believe that the checks are as sure as the 
springs. It is thereby that men are great, and have 
great allies. And who are the allies ? Eude oppo- 
sition, apathy, slander, — even these. Difi&culties 
exist to be surmounted. The great heart will no 
more complain of the obstructions that make suc- 
cess hard, than of the iron walls of the gun which 
hinder the shot from scattering. It was walled 



PEOGRESS OF CULTURE. 207 

round with iron tube with that purpQse, to give it 
irresistible force in one direction. A strenuous 
soul hates cheap successes. It is the ardor of the 
assailant that makes the vigor of the defender. 
The great are not tender at being obscure, despised, 
insulted. Such only feel themselves in adverse 
fortune. Strong men greet war, tempest, hard times, 
which search till they find resistance and bottom. 
They wish, as Pindar said, " to tread the floors of 
hell, with necessities as hard as iron." Periodicity, 
reaction, are laws of mind as well as of matter. 
Bad kings and governors help us, if only they are 
bad enough. In England, it was the game laws 
which exasperated the farmers to carry the Eeform 
Bill. It was what we c?^ ^plantation manners which 
drove peaceable, forgiving !N"ew England to eman- 
cipation without phrase. In the Eebellion, who 
were our best allies ? Always the enemy. The 
community of scholars do not know their own 
power, and dishearten each other by tolerating 
political baseness in their members. Now, nobody 
doubts the power of manners, or that wherever 
high society exists, it is very well able to exclude 
pretenders. The intruder finds himself uncomfort- 
able, and quickly departs to his own gang. It has 
been our misfortune that the politics of America 
have been often immoral. It has had the worst 
effect on character. We are a complaisant, for- 
giving people, presuming, perhaps, on a feeling of 



208 PROGRESS OF CULTURE. 

strength. But it is not by easy virtue, where the 
public is concerned, that heroic results are obtained. 
We have suffered our young men of ambition to 
play the game of politics and take the immoral 
side without loss of caste, — to come and go without 
rebuke. But that kind of loose association does 
not leave a man his own master. He cannot go 
from the good to the evil at pleasure, and then back 
again to the good. There is a text in Swedenborg, 
which tells in figure the plain truth. He saw in 
vision the angels and the devils ; but these two 
companies stood not face to face and hand in hand, 
but foot to foot, — these perpendicular up, and 
those perpendicular down. 

Brothers, I draw new hope from the atmos- 
phere we breathe to-day, from the healthy senti- 
ment of the American people, and from the avowed 
aims and tendencies of the educated class. The 
age has new convictions. We know that in certain 
historic periods there have been times of nega- 
tion, — a decay of thought, and a consequent na- 
tional decline ; that in France, at one time, there 
was almost a repudiation of the moral sentiment, 
in what is called, by distinction, society, — not a 
believer within the Church, and almost not a the- 
ist out of it. In England, the like spiritual dis- 
ease affected the upper class in the time of Charles 
II., and down into the reign of the Georges. But 
it honorably distinguishes the educated class here. 



PROGRESS OF CULTURE. 209 

that they believe in the succor which the heart 
yields to the intellect, and draw greatness from its 
inspirations. And when I say the educated class, 
I know what a benignant breadth that word has, 
— new in the world, — reaching millions instead 
of hundreds. And more, when I look around me, 
and consider the sound material of which the cul- 
tivated class here is made lip, — what high per- 
sonal worth, what love of men, what hope, is joined 
with rich information and practical power, and. 
that the most distinguished by genius and culture 
are in this class of benefactors, « — I cannot distrust 
this great knighthood of virtue, or doubt that the 
interests of science, of letters, of politics and hu- 
manity, are safe. I think their hands are strong 
enough to hold up the Eepublic. I read the prom- 
ise of better times and of greater men. 



PERSIAN POETRY. 



PERSIAN POETRY. 

To Baron von Hammer Purgstall, who died in 
Vienna in 1856, we owe our best knowledge of the 
Persians. He has translated into German, besides 
the "Divan" of Hafiz, specimens of two hundred 
poets, who wrote during a period of five and a half 
centuries, from A. D. 1050 to 1600. The seven mas- 
ters of the Persian Parnassus — Firdousi, Enweri, 
Nisami, Dschelaleddin, Saadi, Hafiz, and Dschami-^ — 
have ceased to be empty names; and others, like 
Ferideddin Attar and Omar Chiam, promise to rise 
in Western estimation. That for which mainly 
books exist is communicated in these rich extracts. 
Many qualities go to make a good telescope, — as 
the largeness of the field, facility of sweeping the 
meridian, achromatic purity of lenses, and so forth, — 
but the one e;minent value is the space-penetrating 
power ; and there are many virtue^ in books, — but 
the essential value is the adding of knowledge to 
our stock, by the record of new facts, and, better,' 
by the record of intuitions, which distribute facts, 
and are the formulas which supersede all his- 
tories. 



214 PERSIAN POETRY. 

Oriental life and society, especially in the South- 
ern nations, stand in violent contrast with the mul- 
titudinous detail, the secular stability, and the vast 
average of comfort of the Western nations. Life 
in the East is fierce, short, hazardous, and in ex- 
tremes. Its elements are few and simple, not 
exhibiting the long range and undulation of Euro- 
pean existence, but rapidly reaching the best and 
the worst. The rich feed on fruits and game, — 
the poor, on a watermelon's peel. All or nothing is 
the genius of Oriental life. Favor of the Sultan, 
or his displeasure, is a question of Fate. A war is 
undertaken for an epigram or a distich, as in Europe 
for a duchy. The prolific sun, and the sudden and 
rank plenty which his heat engenders, make sub- 
sistence easy. On the other side, the desert, the 
simoom, the mirage, the lion, and the plague endan- 
ger it, and life hangs on the contingency of a skin 
of water more or less. The very geography of old 
Persia showed these contrasts. " My father's em- 
pire," said Cyrus to Xenophon, " is so large, that 
people perish with cold, at one extremity, whilst 
they are suffocated with heat, at the other." The 
temperament of the people agrees with this life in 
extremes. Eeligion and poetry are all their civili- 
zation. The religion teaches an inexorable Des- 
tiny. It distinguishes only two days in each 
man's history, — his birthday, called the Day of 
the Lot, and the Day of Judgment. Courage and 



PERSIAN POETRY. 215 

absolute submission to what is appointed him are 
his virtues. 

The favor of the climate, making subsistence 
easy, and encouraging an outdoor life, allows to the 
Eastern nations a highly intellectual organization, 
— leaving out of view, at present, the genius of the 
Hindoos (more Oriental in every sense), whom no 
people have surpassed in the grandeur of their 
ethical statement. The Persians and the Arabs, 
with great leisure and few books, are exquisitely 
sensible to the pleasures of poetry. Layard has 
given some details of the effect which the improv- 
visatori produced on the children of the desert. 
" When the bard improvised an amatory ditty, the 
young chiefs excitement was almost beyond control. 
The other Bedouins were scarcely less moved by 
these rude measures, wliich have the same kind 
of effect on the wild tribes of the Persian moun- 
tains. Such verses, chanted by their self-taught 
poets, or by the girls of their encampment, will 
drive warriors to the combat, fearless of death, or 
prove an ample reward, on their return from the 
dangers of the ghazon, or the fight. The excite- 
ment they produce exceeds that of the grape. He 
who would understand the influence of the Homeric 
ballads in the heroic ages should witness the effect 
which similar compositions have upon the wild 
nomads of the East." Elsewhere he adds, " Poetry 
and flowers are the wine and spirits of the Arab ; a 



216, PERSIAN POETRY. 

couplet is equal to a bottle, and a rose to a dram, 
without the evil effect of either." 

The Persian poetry rests on a mythology whose 
few legends are connected with the Jewish history, 
and the anterior traditions of the Pentateuch. The 
principal figure in the allusions of Eastern poetry 
is Solomon. Solomon had three talismans : first, 
the signet-ring, by which he commanded the spirits, 
on the stone of which was engraven the name of 
God ; second, the glass, in which he saw the secrets 
of his enemies, and the causes of all things, figured ; 
the third, the east-wind, which was his horse. His 
counsellor was Simorg, king of birds, the all-wise 
fowl, who had lived ever since the beginning of the 
world, and now lives alone on the highest summit 
of Mount Kaf. No fowler has taken him, and none 
now living has seen him. By him Solomon was 
taught the language of birds, so that he heard 
secrets whenever he went into his gardens. When 
Solomon travelled, his throne was placed on a car- 
pet of green silk, of a length and breadth sufficient 
for all his army to stand upon, — men placing 
themselves on his right hand, and the spirits on 
his left. When all were in order, the east-wind, at 
his command, took up the carpet and transported it, 
with all that were upon it, whither he pleased, — 
the army of birds at the same time flying overhead, 
and forming a canopy to shade them from the sun. 
It is related, that, when the Queen of Sheba came 



PERSIAN POETRY. 217 

to visit Solomon, he had built, against her arrival, a 
palace, of which the floor or pavement was of glass, 
laid over running water, in which fish were swim- 
ming. The Queen of Sheba was deceived thereby, 
and raised her robes, thinking she was to pass 
through the water. On the occasion of Solomon's 
marriage, all the beasts, laden with presents, ap- 
peared before his throne. Behind them all came 
the ant with a blade of grass : Solomon did not de- 
spise the gift of the ant. Asaph, the vizier, at a 
certain time, lost the seal of Solomon, which one 
of the Dews, or evil spirits, found, and, governing 
in the name of Solomon, deceived the people. 

Firdousi, the Persian Homer, has written in the 
Shah Nameh the annals of the fabulous and heroic 
kings of the country : of Karun (the Persian Croe- 
sus), the immeasurably rich gold-maker, who, with 
all his treasures, lies buried not far from the Pyra- 
mids, in the sea which bears his name ; of Jam- 
schid, the binder of demons, whose reign lasted 
seven hundred years ; of Kai Kaus, in whose palace, 
built by demons on Alberz, gold and silver and 
precious stones were used so lavishly, that in the 
brilliancy produced by their combined effect, night 
and day appeared the same ; of Afrasiyab, strong 
as an elephant, whose shadow extended for miles, 
whose heart was bounteous as the ocean, and his 
hands like the clouds when rain falls to gladden 
the earth. The crocodile in the rolling stream 

10 



218 PEESIAN POETRY. 

had no safety from Afrasiyab. Yet when he came 
to fight against the generals of Kaus, he was but an 
insect in the grasp of Eustem, who seized him by 
the girdle, and dragged him from his horse. Eus- 
tem felt such anger at the arrogance- of the King 
of Mazinderan, that every hair on his body started 
up like a spear. The gripe of his hand cracked the 
sinews of an enemy. 

These legends,— with Chiser, the fountain of Hfe, 
Tuba, the tree of life, — the romances of the loves 
of Leila and Medschun, of Chosru and Schirin, and 
those of the nightingale for the rose, — pearl-diving, 
and the virtues of gems, — the cohol, a cosmetic by 
which pearls and eyebrows are indelibly stained 
black, — the bladder in which musk is brought,— 
the down of the lip, the mole on the cheek, the 
eyelash, — lilies, roses, tulips, and jasmines, — make 
the staple imagery of Persian odes. 

The Persians have epics and tales, but, for the 
most part, they affect short poems and epigrams. 
Gnomic verses, rules of life conveyed in a lively 
image, especially in an image addressed to the eye, 
and contained in a single stanza, were always cur- 
rent in the East ; and if the poem is long, it is only 
a string of unconnected verses. They use an incon- 
secutiveness quite alarming to Western logic, and 
the connection between the stanzas of their longer 
odes is much like that between the refrain of our 
old English ballads. 



PERSIAN POETRY. 219 

"The sun shines fair on Carlisle wall," 
or 

'* The rain it raineth every day," 

and the main story. 

Take, as specimens of these gnomic verses, the 
following : — 

**The secret that should not be blown 
Not one of thy nation must know ; 
You may padlock the gate of a town. 
But never the mouth of a foe. " 

Or this of Omar Chiam : — 

" On earth's wide thoroughfares below 
Two only men contented go : 
Who knows what 's right and what 's forbid. 
And he from whom is knowledge hid." 

Here is a poem on a melon, by Adsched of 
Meru : — 

*' Color, taste, and smell, smaragdus, sugar, and musk, — 
Amber for the tongue, for the eye a picture rare, — 
If you cut the fruit in slices, every slice a crescent fair, — 
If you leave it whole, the full harvest moon is there." 

Hafiz is the prince of Persian poets, and in his 
extraordinary gifts adds to some of the attributes 
of Pindar, Anacreon, Horace, and Burns the insight 
of a mystic, that sometimes affords a deeper glance 
at Nature than belongs to either of these bards. 
He accosts all topics with an easy audacity. " He 
only," he says, " is fit for company, who knows how 
to prize earthly happiness at the value of a night- 
cap. Our father Adam sold Paradise for two 'ker- 



220 PERSIAIT POETRY. 

nels of wheat ; tlien blame me not, if I hold it dear 
at one grapestone." He says to the Shah, " Thou 
who rulest after words and thoughts which no ear 
has heard and no mind has thought, abide firm 
until thy young destiny tears off his blue coat from 
the old graybeard of the sky." He says, — 

*• I "batter the wheel of heaven 
"When it rolls not rightly by ; 
I am not one of the snivellers 
Who fall thereon and die." 

The rapidity of his turns is always surprising 

us: — 

" See how the roses bum! 

Bring wine to quench the fire ! 
Alas! the flames come up with us, — 
We perish with desire." 

After the manner of his nation, he abounds in 
pregnant sentences which might be engraved on a 
sword-blade and almost on a ring. 

"In honor dies he to whom the great seems ever 
wonderful." 

" Here is the sum, that, when one door opens, another 
shuts." 

"On every side is an ambush laid by the robber- 
troops of circumstance ; hence it is that the horseman of 
life urges on his courser at headlong speed." 

" The earth is a host who murders his guests." 

"Good is what goes on the road of ;N"ature. On the 
straight way the traveller never misses." 



PERSIAN POETRY. 221 

** Alas! till now I had not known 
My guide and Fortune's guide are one." 

** The understanding's copper coin 
Counts not with the gold of love." 

" 'T is writ on Paradise's gate, 
* "Woe to the dupe that yields to Fate ! ' " 

" The world is a bride superbly dressed ; — 
"Who weds her for dowry must pay his soul." 

*' Loose the knots of the heart ; never think on thy fate : 
No Euclid has yet disentangled that snarl." 

" There resides in the grieving 
^ A poison to kill ; 

Beware to go near them 
'T is pestilent still." 

Harems and wine-shops only give him a new- 
ground of observation, whence to draw sometimes a 
deeper moral than regulated sober life affords, — 
and this is foreseen : — 

*' I will be drunk and down with wine ; 
Treasures we find in a ruined house." 

Eiot, he thinks, can snatch from the deeply hidden 
lot the veil that covers it : — 

** To be wise the dull brain so earnestly throbs, 
Bring bands of wine for the stupid head." 

** The Builder of heaven 

Hath sundered the earth. 
So that no footway 
Leads out of it forth. 



222, PERSIAN POETRY. 

** On turnpikes of wonder 
^ "Wine leads the mind forth, 
Straight, sidewise, and upward, 
"West, southward, and north. 

" Stands the vault adamantine 
Until the Doomsday ; 
The wine-cup shall ferry 
Thee o'er it away." 

That hardihood and self-equality of every sound 
nature, which result from the feeling that the spirit 
in him is entire and as good as the world, which en- 
title the poet to speak with authority, and make 
him an object of interest, and his every phrase and 
syllable significant, are in Hafiz, and abundantly 
fortify and ennoble his tone. 

His was the fluent mind in which every thought 
and feeling came readily to the lips. " Loose the 
knots of the heart," he says. We absorb elements 
enough, but have not leaves and lungs for healthy 
perspiration and growth. An air of sterility, of in- 
competence to their proper aims, belongs to many 
who have both experience and wisdom. But a 
large utterance, a river that makes its own shores, 
quick perception and corresponding expression, a 
constitution to which every morrow is a new day, 
which is equal to the needs of life, at once tender 
and bold, with great arteries, — this generosity of 
ebb and flow satisfies, and we should be willing to 
die when our time comes, having had our swing and 
gratification. The difference is not so much in the 



PEESIAN POETRY. 223 

quality of men's thoughts as in the power of utter- 
ing them. What is pent and smouldered in the 
dumb actor is not pent in the poet, but passes over 
into new form, at once relief and creation. 

The other merit of Hafiz is his intellectual lib- 
erty, which is a certificate of profound thought. We 
accept the religions and politics into which we fall ; 
and it is only a few delicate spirits who are suffi- 
cient to see that the whole web of convention is the 
imbecility of those whom it entangles, — that the 
mind suffers no religion and no empire but its own. 
It indicates this respect to absolute truth by the use 
it makes of the symbols that are most stable and 
reverend, and therefore is always provoking the ac- 
' cusation of irreligion. 

Hypocrisy is the perpetual butt of his arrows. 

*' Let us draw the cowl through, the brook of wine." 

He tells his mistress, that not the dervis, or the 
monk, but the lover, has in his heart the spirit 
which makes the ascetic and the saint ; and cer- 
tainly not their cowls and mummeries, but her 
glances, can impart to him the fire and virtue need- 
ful for such self-denial. Wrong shall not be wrong 
to Hafiz, for the name's sake. A law or statute is to 
him what a fence is to a nimble school-boy, — a 
temptation for a jump. '' We would do nothing but 
good, else would shame come to us on the day when 
the soul must hie hence; and should they then 



224 PERSIAN POETEY. 

deny us Paradise, the Houris tliemselves would for- 
sake that, and come out to us." 

His complete intellectual emancipation he com- 
municates to the reader. There is no example of 
such facility of allusion, such use of all materials. 
Nothing is too high, nothing too low, for his occa- 
sion. He fears nothing, he stops for nothing. Love 
is a leveller, and Allah becomes a groom, and heaven 
a closet, in his daring hymns to his mistress or to 
his cupbearer. This boundless charter is the right 
of genius. 

We do not wish to strew sugar on bottled spiders, 
or try to make mystical divinity out of the Song of 
Solomon, much less out of thd erotic and baccha- 
nalian songs of Hafiz. Hafiz himself is determined 
to defy all such hypocritical interpretation, and 
tears off his turban and throws it at the head of the 
meddling dervis, and throws his glass after the tur- 
ban. But the love or the wine of Hafiz is not to be 
confounded with vulgar debauch. It is the spirit 
in which the song is written that imports, and not 
the topics. Hafiz praises wine, roses, maidens, boys, 
birds, mornings, and music, to give vent to his im- 
mense hilarity and sympathy with every form of 
beauty and joy ; and lays the emphasis on these to 
mark his scorn of sanctimony and base prudence. 
These are the natural topics" and language of his wit 
and perception. But it is the play of wit and the 
joy of song that he loves ; and if you mistake him 



PERSIAN POETRY. 225 

for a low rioter, he turns short on you with verses 
which express the poverty of sensual joys, and to 
ejaculate with equal fire the most unpalatable affir- 
mations of heroic sentiment and contempt for the 
world. Sometimes it is a glance from the height 
of thought, as thus : — 

" Bring wine ; for, in the audience-hall of the soul's 
independence, what is sentinel or Sultan"? what is the 
wise man or the intoxicated 1 " 

And sometimes his feast, feasters, and world are 
only one pebble more in the eternal vortex and 
revolution of Tate : — 

'* I am : what I am 
My dust will be again." 

A saint might lend an ear to the riotous fun of Fal- 
staff; for it is not created to excite the animal 
appetites, but to vent the joy of a supernal intelli- 
gence. In all poetry, Pindar's rule holds, — cvve- 
ToU (jxovel, it speaks to the intelligent ; and Hafiz 
is a poet for poets, whether he write, as sometimes, 
with a parrot's, or, as at other times, with an eagle's 
quill. 

Every song of Hafiz affords new proof of the un- 
importance of your subject to success, provided only 
the treatment be cordial. In general, what is more 
tedious than dedications or panegyrics addressed to 
grandees ? Yet in the " Divan " you would not 
skip them, since his muse seldom supports him bet- 
ter. 

10* o 



226 PERSIAN POETEY. 

** What lovelier forms things wear, 
Now that the Shah comes back ! " 

And again : — 

" Thy foes to hunt, thy enviers to strike down, 
Poises Arcturus aloft morning and evening his spear." 

It is told of Hafiz, that, when he had written a 
compliment to a handsome youth, — 

" Take my heart in thy hand, beautiful boy of Shiraz ! 
I would give for the mole on thy cheek Samarcand and Bu- 
chara ! " — 

the verses came to "the ears of Timour in his palace. 
Timour taxed Hafiz with treating disrespectfully 
his two cities, to raise, and adorn which he had con- 
quered nations. Hafiz replied, "Alas, my lord, if I 
had not been so prodigal, I had not been so poor ! " 
The Persians had a mode of establishing copy- 
right the most secure of any contrivance with 
which we are acquainted. The law of the ghaselle, 
or shorter ode, requires that the poet insert his 
name in the last stanza. Almost every one of 
several hundreds of poems of Hafiz contains his 
name thus interwoven more or less closely with 
the subject of the piece. It is itself a test of skill, 
as this self-naming is not quite easy. We remem- 
ber but two or three examples in English poetry : 
that of Chaucer, in the " House of Fame " ; Jon- 
son's epitaph on his son, — 

" Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry " ; 



PERSIAN POETEY. 227 

and Cowley's, — 

"The melancholy Cowley lay." 

But it is easy to Hafiz. It gives him the oppor- 
tunity of the most playful self-assertion, always 
gracefully, sometimes almost in the fun of !Fal- 
staff, sometimes with feminine delicacy. He tells 
us, " The angels in heaven were lately learning his 
last pieces." He says, " The fishes shed their 
pearls, out of desire and longing as soon as the 
ship of Hafiz swims the deep." 

** Out of the East, and out of the West, no man understands me ; 
0, the happier I, who confide to none but the wind ! 
This morning heard I how the lyre of the stars resounded, 
' Sweeter tones have we heard from Hafiz ! ' " 

Again, — 

" I heard the harp of the planet "Venus, and it said 
in the early mornmg, ' I am the disciple of the sweet- 
voiced Hafiz ! ' " 

And again, — 

" When Hafiz sings, the angels hearken, and Anaitis, 
the leader of the starry host, calls even the Messiah in 
heaven out to the dance." 

" 'No one has unvailed thoughts like Hafiz, since the 
locks of the Word-bride were first curled." 

" Only he despises the verse of Hafiz who is not him- 
self hy nature noble." 

But we must try to give some of these poetic 



228 PERSIAN POETRY. 

flourishes the metrical form which they seem to 
require : — 

" Fit for the Pleiads' azure chord 
The songs I sung, the pearls I bored.** 

Another : — 

" I have no hoarded treasure. 
Yet have I rich content ; 
The first from Allah to the Shah, 
The last to Hafiz went." 

Another : — 

"High heart, Hafiz ! though not thine 
Fine gold and silver ore ; 
More worth to thee the gift of song. 
And the clear insight more." 

Again: — 

" Haiiz ! speak not of thy need ; 
Are not these verses thine ? 
Then all the poets are agreed, 
No man can less repine." 

He asserts his dignity as bard and inspired man 
of his people. To the vizier returning from Mecca 
he says, — 

" Boast not rashly, prince of pilgrims, of thy fortune. 
Thou hast indeed seen the temple ; hut I, the Lord of 
the temple. Nor has any man inhaled from the musk- 
hladder of the merchant, or from the musky morning- 
wind, that sweet air which I am permitted to breathe 
every hour of the day." 
And with still more vigor in the following lines : — 

"Oft have I said, I say it once more, 
I, a wanderer, do not stray from myself. 



PERSIAN POETRY. 229 

I am a kind of paiTot ; the mirror is holden to me ; 
What the Eternal says, I stammering say again. 
Give me what you will ; I eat thistles as roses, 
And according to my food I grow and I give. 
Scorn me not, but know I have the pearl, 
And am only seeking one to receive it." 

And his olaim has been admitted from the first. 
The muleteers and camel-drivers, on their way- 
through the desert, sing snatches of his songs, not 
so much for the thought, as for their joyful temper 
and tone; and the cultivated Persians know his 
poems by heart. Yet Hafiz does not appear to 
have set any great value on his songs, since his 
scholars collected them for the first time after his 
death. 

In the following poem the soul is figured as the 
Phoenix alighting on Tuba, the Tree of Life : — 

**My phoenix long ago secured 

His nest in the sky-vault's cope ; 
In the body's cage immured. 
He was weary of life's hope. 

** Round and round this heap of ashes 
Now flies the bird amain, 
But in that odorous niche of heaven 
Nestles the bird again. 

" Once flies he upward, he will perch 
On Tuba's golden bough ; 
His home is on that fruited arch 
"Which cools the blest below. 

** If over this world of ours 

His wings my phoenix spread. 



230 PERSIAN POETEY. 

How gracious falls on land and sea 
The soul-refreshing shade"! 

*' Either world inhabits he. 

Sees oft below him planets roll ; 
His body is all of air compact, 
Of Allah's love his soul." 

Here is an ode wMcli is said to be a favorite with 
all educated Persians : — 

*' Come ! — the palace of heaven rests on aery pillars, — 
Come, and bring me wine ; our days are wind. 
I declare myself the slave of that masculine soul 
Which ties and alliance on earth once forever renounces. " 
Told I thee yester-morn how the Iris of heaven 
Brought to me in my cup a gospel of joy ? 

high-flying falcon ! the Tree of Life is thy perch ; 
This nook of giief fits thee ill for a nest. 

Hearken ! they call to thee down from the ramparts of heaven ; 

1 cannot divine what holds thee here in a net. 

I, too, have a counsel for thee ; 0, mark it and keep it. 

Since I received the same from the Master above : 

Seek not for faith or for truth in "a world of light-minded girls ; 

A thousand suitors reckons this dangerous bride. 

Cumber thee not for the world, and this my precept forget not, 

'T is but a toy that a vagabond sweetheart has left us. 

Accept whatever befalls ; uncover thy brow from thy locks ; 

Never to me nor to thee was option imparted ; 

Neither endurance nor truth belongs to the laugh of the rose. 

The loving nightingale mourns ; — cause enow for mourning ; — 

"Why envies the bird the streaming verses of Hafiz ? 

Know that. a god bestowed on him eloquent speech." 

The cedar, the cypress, the palm, the olive, and 
fig-tree, the birds that inhabit them, and the gar- 
den flowers, are never wanting in these musky 



PEESIAN POETRY. 231 

verses, and are always named with effect. "The 
willows/' he says, " bow themselves to every wind, 
out of shame for their unfruitfulness." We may 
open anywhere on a floral catalogue. 

*' By breath of beds of roses drawn, 

I found the grove in the morning pure, 
In the concert of the nightingales 
My drunken brain to 'cure. 

** With unrelated glance 

I looked the rose in the eye : 

The rose in the hour of gloaming 

Flamed like a lamp hard-by. 

** She was of her beauty proud. 
And prouder of her youth, 
The while unto her flaming heart 
The bulbul gave his truth. 

*' The sweet narcissus closed 

Its eye, with passion pressed ; 
The tulips out of envy burned 
Moles in their scarlet breast. 

*' The lilies white prolonged 

Their sworded tongue to the smell ; 
The clustering anemones 
Their pretty secrets tell." 

Presently we have, — 

" All day the rain 
Bathed the dark hyacinths in vain, 
The flood may pour from morn till night 
Nor wash the pretty Indians white." 

And so onward, through many a page. 



232 " PERSIAN POETRY. 

This picture of the first days of Spring, from 
Enweri, seems to belong to Hafiz: — 

. ** O'er the garden water goes the wind alone 

To rasp and to polish the cheek of the wave ; 
The fire is quenched on the dear hearthstone, 
But it hums again on the tulips brave." 

Friendship is a favorite topic of the Eastern poets, 
and they have matched on this head the absolute- 
ness of Montaigne. 

Hafiz says, — 

" Thou learnest no secret until thou knowest friend- 
ship ; since to the unsound no heavenly knowledge 
enters." 

Ibn Jemin writes thus : — 

"Whilst I disdain the populace, 
I find no peer in higher place. 
Friend is a word of royal tone. 
Friend is a poem all alone. 
Wisdom is like the elephant. 
Lofty and rare inhabitant : 
He dwells in deserts or in courts ; 
With hucksters he has no resorts." 

Dschami says, — 

"A friend is he, who, hunted as a foe. 

So much the kindlier shows him than before ; 
Throw stones at him, or ruder javelins throw, 
He builds with stone and steel a firmer floor." 

Of the amatory poetry of Hafiz we must be very 
sparing in our citations, though it forms the sta- 
ple of the " Divan." He has run through the whole 



PERSIAN POETEY. 233 

gainut of passion, — from the sacred to the borders, 
and over the borders, of the profane. The same 
confusion of high and low, the celerity of flight 
and allusion which our colder muses forbid, is ha- 
bitual to him. From the plain text, — 

"The chemist of love 

■Will this perishing mould, 
Were it made out of mire, 
Transmute into gold," — 

he proceeds to the celebration of his passion ; and 
nothing in his religious or in his scientific traditions 
is too sacred or too remote to afford a token of his 
mistress. The Moon thought she knew her own 
orbit well enough ; but when she saw the curve on 
Zuleika's cheek, she was at a loss : — 

"And since round lines are drawn 
My darling's lips about, 
The very Moon looks puzzled on, 
And hesitates in doubt 
[ If the sweet curve that rounds thy mouth 
Be not her true way to the South." 

His ingenuity never sleeps : — 

"Ah, could I hide me in my song. 
To kiss thy lips from which it flows ! " 

and plays in a thousand pretty courtesies : — 

"Fair fall thy soft heart ! 

A good work wilt thou do ? 
0, pray for the dead 
Whom thine eyelashes slew !" 



234 PEKSIAN POETRY. 

And what a nest has he found for his bonny bird to 
take up her abode in ! — 

** They strew in the path of kings and czars 
Jewels and gems of price : 
But for thy head I will pluck down stars, 
And pave thy way with eyes. 

**I have sought for thee a costlier dome 
Than Mahmoud's palace high, 
And thou, returning, find thy home 
In the apple of Love's eye." 

Then we have all degrees of passionate abandon- 
ment : — 

'* I know this perilous love-lane 
No whither the traveller leads, 
Yet my fancy the sweet scent of 
Thy tangled tresses feeds. 

** In the midnight of thy locks, 
I renounce the day ; 
In the ring of thy rose-lips, 
My heart forgets to pray." 

And sometimes his love rises to a religious senti- 
ment : — 

"Plunge in yon angry waves, 
Eenouncing douht and care ; 
The flowing of the seven broad seas 
Shall never wet thy hair. 

" Is Allah's face on thee 

Bending with love benign, 

And thou not less on Allah's eye 

fairest ! turnest thine. "• 

We add to these fragments of Hafiz a few speci- 
mens from other poets. 



PERSIAN POETRY, 235 

NISAMI. 

"While roses bloomed along the plain, 
The nightingale to the falcon said, 
* Why, of all birds, must thou be dumb ? 
With closed mouth thou utterest, 
Though dying, no last word to man. 
Yet sitt'st thou on the hand of princes, 
And feedest on the grouse's breast. 
Whilst I, who hundred thousand jewels 
Squander in a single tone, 
Lo ! I feed myself with worms, 
And my dwelling is the thorn.' — 
The falcon answered, *Be all ear : 
I, experienced in affairs, 
See fifty things, say never one ; 
But thee the people prizes not. 
Who, doing nothing, say'st a thousand. 
To me, appointed to the chase, 
The king's hand gives the grouse's breast ; 
Whilst a chatterer like thee 
Must gnaw worms in the thorn. Farewell ! ' " 

The following passages exhibit the strong ten- 
dency of the Persian poets to contemplative and 
religious poetry and to allegory. 

ENWERI. 

BODY AND SOrL. 

" A painter in China once painted a hall ; — 
Such a web never hung on an emperor's wall ; — 
One half from his brush with rich colors did run, 
The other he touched with a beam of the sun ; 
So that all which delighted the eye in one side. 
The same, j)oint for point, in the other replied. 



236 pees;a.n poetey. 

" In thee, friend, that Tyrian chamber is found ; 
Thine the star-pointing roof, and the base on the ground : 
Is one half depicted with colors less bright ? 
Beware that the counterpart blazes with light ! " 



IBF JEMIK 

*• I read on the porch of a palace bold 

In a purple tablet letters cast, — 
* A house though a million winters old, 

A house of earth comes down at last ; 
Then quarry thy stones from the crystal All, 
And build the dome that shall not fall.' " 

"What need," cries the mystic Feisi, "of palaces 
and tapestry ? What need even of a bed ? 

" The eternal Watcher, who doth wake 
All night in the body's earthen chest, 
Will of thine arms a pillow make. 
And a bolster of thy breast." 

Ferideddin Attar wrote the " Bird Conversations/' 
a mystical tale, in which the birds, coming together 
to choose their king, resolve on a pilgrimage to 
Mount Kaf, to pay their homage to the Simorg. 
From this poem, written five hundred years ago, we 
cite the following passage, as a proof of the identity 
of mysticism in all periods. The tone is quite 
modern. In the fable, the birds were soon weary 
of the length and difficulties of the way, and at last 
almost all gave out. Three only persevered, and 
arrived before the throne of the Simorg. 



PERSIAN POETRY. 237 

"The bird-soul was ashamed ; 
Their body was quite annihilated ; 
They had cleaned themselves from the dust, * 

And were by the light ensouled. 
"What was, and was not, — the Past, — 
Was wiped out from their breast. 
The sun from near-by beamed 
Clearest light into their soul ; 
The resplendence of the Simorg beamed 
As one back from all three. 
They knew not, amazed, if they 
Were either this or that. 
They saw themselves all as Simorg, 
Themselves in the eternal Simorg. 
When to the Simorg up they looked, 
They beheld him among themselves ; 
And when they looked on each other. 
They saw themselves in the Simorg. 
A single look grouped the two parties. 
The Simorg emerged, the Simorg vanished, 
This in that, and that in this, 
As the world has never heard. 
So remained they, sunk in wonder, 
Thoughtless in deepest thinking. 
And quite unconscious of themselves. 
Speechless prayed they to the Highest 
To open this secret. 
And to unlock Thou and We. 
There came an answer without tongue. — 
* The Highest is a sun-mirror ; 
Who comes to Him sees himself therein. 
Sees body and soul, and soul and body ; 
When you came to the Simorg, 
Three therein appeared to you. 
And, had fifty of you come, 
So had you seen yourselves as many. 



238 PERSIAN POETRY. 

Him has none of us yet seen. 

Ants see not tlie Pleiades. 

Can the gnat grasp with his teeth 

The body of the elephant? 

What you see is He not; 

What you hear is He not. 

The valleys which you traverse, 

The actions which you perform, 

They lie under our treatment 

And among our properties. 

You as three birds are amazed, 

Impatient, heartless, confused: 

Far over you am I raised, 

Since I am in act Simorg. 

Ye blot out my highest being, 

That ye may find yourselves on my throne; 

Forever ye blot out yourselves. 

As shadows in the sun. Farewell ! ' " 



I¥SPIEATIO¥. 



INSPIRATION. 

It was Watt who told King George III. that 
he dealt in an article of which kings were said to 
be fond, — Power. 'T is certain that the one thing 
we wish to know is, where power is to be bought. 
But we want a finer kind than that of commerce ; 
and every reasonable man would give any price 
of house and land, and future provision, for con- 
densation, concentration, and the recalling at will 
of high mental energy. Our money is only a 
second best. We would jump to buy power with 
it, that is, intellectual perception moving the will. 
That is first best. But we don't know where the 
shop is. If Watt knew, he forgot to tell us the 
number of the street. There are times when the 
intellect is so active that everything seems to run 
to meet it. Its supplies are found without much 
thought as to studies. Knowledge runs to the man, 
and the man runs to knowledge. In spring, when 
the snow melts, the maple-trees flow with sugar, 
and you cannot get tubs fast enough ; but it is only 
for a few days. The hunter on the prairie, at the 

Q 



242 INSPIRATION. 

right season, has no need of -choosing his ground ; 
east, west, by the river, by the timber, he is every- 
where near his game. But the favorable conditions 
are rather the exception than the rule. 

The aboriginal man in geology, and in the dim 
lights of Darwin's microscope, is not an engaging 
figure. We are very glad that he ate his fishes and 
snails and marrow-bones out of our sight and 
hearing, and that his doleful experiences were got 
through with so very long ago. They combed liis 
mane, they pared his nails, cut off his tail, set him 
on end, sent him to school, and made him pay 
taxes, before he could begin to write his sad story 
for the compassion or the repudiation of his de- 
scendants, who are all but unanimous to disown 
him. We must take him as we find him, — pretty 
well on in his education, and, in all our knowledge 
of him, an interesting creature, with a will, an in- 
vention, an imagination, a conscience, and an inex- 
tinguishable hope. 

The Hunterian law of arrested development is 
not confined to vegetable and animal structure, but 
reaches the human intellect also. In the savage 
man, thought is infantile ; and in the civilized, 
unequal, and ranging up and down a long scale. 
In the best races it is rare and imperfect. In 
happy moments it is reinforced, and carries out 
what were rude suggestions to larger scope, and to 
clear and grand conclusions. The poet cannot see 



INSPIRATION. 243 

a natural plienomenon which does not express to 
him a correspondent fact in his mental experience ; 
he is made aware of a power to carry on and com- 
plete the metamorphosis of natural into spiritual 
facts. Everything which we hear for the first 
time was expected by the mind ; the newest dis- 
covery was expected. In the mind we call this 
enlarged power Inspiration. I believe that nothing 
great and lasting can be done except by inspira- 
tion, by leaning on the secret augury. The man's 
insight and power are interrupted and occasional ; 
he can see and do this or that cheap task at will, 
but it steads him not beyond. He is fain to make 
the ulterior step by mechanical means. It cannot 
so be done. That ulterior step is to be also by 
inspiration; if not through him, then by another 
man. Every real step is by what a poet called 
" lyrical glances," by lyrical facility, and never by 
main strength and ignorance. Years of mechanic 
toil will only seem to do it ; it will not so be done. 

Inspiration is like yeast. 'T is no matter in 
which of half a dozen ways you procure the infec- 
tion ; you can apply one or the other equally well 
to your purpose, and get your loaf of bread. And 
every earnest workman, in whatever kind, knows 
some favorable conditions for his task. When I 
wish to write on any topic, 't is of no consequence 
what kind of book or man gives me a hint or a 
motion, nor how far off that is from my topic. 



244 INSPIRATION. 

Power is the first good. Earey can tame a wild 
horse ; but if he could give speed to a dull horse, 
were not that better? The toper finds, without 
asking, the road to the tavern, but the poet does 
not know the pitcher that holds his nectar. Every ] 
youth should know the way to prophecy as surely 
as the miller understands how to let on the water 
or the engineer the steam. A rush of thoughts is 
the only conceivable prosperity that can come to 
us. Fine clothes, ec[uipages, villa, park, social con- 
sideration, cannot cover up real poverty and insig- 
nificance from my own eyes, or from others like 
mine. 

Thoughts let us into realities. !N"either miracle, ' 
nor magic, nor any religious tradition, not the im- 
mortality of the private soul, is incredible, after we 
have experienced an insight, a thought. I think it 
comes to some men but once in their life, sometimes 
a religious impulse, sometimes an intellectual in- 
sight. But what we want is consecutiveness. 'T is 
wdth us a flash of light, then a long darkness, then 
a flash again. The separation of our days by sleep 
almost destroys identity. Could we but turn these 
fugitive sparkles into an astronomy of Copernican 
worlds ! With most men, scarce a link of memory 
holds yesterday and to-day together. Their house 
and trade and families serve them as ropes to give 
a coarse continuity. But they have forgotten the 
thoughts of yesterday; they say to-day what oc- 



INSPIEATION. 245 

curs to them, and something else to-morrow. This 
insecurity of possession, this quick ebb of power, — 
as if life were a thunder-storm wherein you can 
see by a flash the horizon, and then cannot see 
your hand, — tantalizes us. We cannot make the 
inspiration consecutive. A glimpse, a point of view 
that by its brightness excludes the purview, is 
granted, but no panorama. A fuller inspiration 
should cause the point to flow and become a line, 
should bend the line and complete the circle. To- 
day the electric machine will not work, no spark 
will pass; then presently the world is all a cat's 
back, all sparkle and shock. Sometimes there is 
no sea-fire, and again the sea is aglow to the hori- 
zon. Sometimes the ^olian harp is dumb all day 
in the window, and again it is garrulous, and tells 
all the secrets of the world. In June the morning 
is noisy with birds; in August they are already 
getting old and silent. 

Hence arises the question. Are these moods in any 
degree within control ? If w^e knew how to command 
them ! But where is the Franklin with kite or rod 
for this fluid ? — a Franklin who can draw off electri- 
city from Jove himself, and convey it into the arts of 
life, inspire men, take them off their feet, withdraw 
them from the life of trifles and gain and comfort, 
and make the world transparent, so that they can 
read the symbols of nature ? What metaphysician 
has undertaken to enumerate the tonics of the tor- 



246 INSPIRATION. 

pid mind, the rules for the recovery of inspiration ? 
That is least within control which is best in them. 
Of the modus of inspiration we have no knowl- 
edge. But in the experience of meditative men 
there is a certain agreement as to the conditions 
of reception. Plato, in his seventh Epistle, notes 
that the perception is only accomplished by long 
familiarity with the objects of intellect, and a life 
according to the things themselves. " Then a light, 
as if leaping from a fire, will on a sudden be enkin- 
dled in the soul, and will then itself nourish itself." 

He said again, " The man who is his own master 
knocks in vain at the doors of poetry." The artists 
must be sacrificed to their art. Like the bees, they 
must put their lives into the sting they give. What 
is a man good for without enthusiasm ? and what 
is enthusiasm but this daring of ruin for its object ? 
There are thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls ; 
we are not the less drawn to them. The moth 
flies into the flame of the lamp ; and Swedenborg 
must solve the problems that haunt him, though he 
be crazed or killed. 

There is genius as well in virtue as in intellect. 
'Tis the doctrine of faith over works. The rap- 
tures of goodness are as old as history and new with 
this morning's sun. The legends of Arabia, Persia, 
and India are of the same complexion as the 
Christian. Socrates, Menu, Confucius, Zertusht, — 
we recognize in all of them this ardor to solve the 
hints of thought. 



INSPIEATION. 247 

I hold that ecstasy will be found normal, or only 
an example on a higher plane of the same gentle 
gravitation by which stones fall and rivers run. 
Experience identifies. Shakspeare seems to you 
miraculous ; but the wonderful juxtapositions, par- 
allelisms, transfers, which his genius effected were 
all to him locked together as links of a chain, and 
the mode precisely as conceivable and familiar to 
higher intelligence as the index-making of the lit- 
erary hack. The result of the hack is inconceiv- 
able to the type-setter who waits for it. 

We must prize our own youth. Later, we want 
heat to execute our plans : the good- will, the knowl- 
edge, the whole armory of means, are all present ; 
but a certain heat that once used not to fail refuses 
its office, and all is vain until this capricious fuel is 
supplied. It seems a semi-animal heat ; as if tea, 
or wine, or sea-air, or mountains, or a genial com- 
panion, or a new thought suggested in book or con- 
versation, could fire the train, wake the fancy, and 
the clear perception. Pit-coal, — where to find it ? 
'Tis of no use that your engine is made like a 
watch, — that you are a good workman, and know 
how to drive it, if there is no coal. We are waiting 
until some tyrannous idea emerging out of heaven 
shall seize and bereave us of this liberty with which 
we are falling abroad. Well, we have the same 
hint or suggestion, day by day. " I am not," says 
the man, " at the top of my condition to-day, but the 



248 INSPIEATION. 

favorable hour will come when I can command, all 
my powers, and when that wiU be easy to do which 
is at this moment impossible." See how the fassions 
augment our force, — anger, love, ambition ! some- 
times sympathy, and the expectation of men. Gar- 
rick said, that on the stage his great paroxysms 
surprised himself as much as his audience. If this 
is true on this low plane, it is true on the higher. 
Swedenborg's genius was the perception of the doc- 
trine " that the Lord flows into the spirits of an- 
gels and of men"; and all poets have signalized 
their consciousness of rare moments when they 
were superior to themselves, — when a light, a 
freedom, a power came to them, which lifted them 
to performances far better than they could reach at 
other times ; so that a religious poet once told me 
that " he valued his poems, not because they were 
his, but because they were not." He thought the 
angels brought them to him. 

Jacob Behmen said: "Art has not wrote here, 
nor was there any time to consider how to set it 
punctually down according to the right understand- 
ing of the letters, but all was 'ordered according to 
the direction of the spirit, which often went on 
haste, — so that the penman's hand, by reason he 
was not accustomed to it, did often shake. And, 
though I could have written in a more accurate, 
fair, and plain manner, the burning fire often forced 
forward with speed, and the hand and pen must 



INSPIRATION. 249 

hasten directly after it, for it comes and goes as a 
sudden shower. In one quarter of an hour I saw 
and knew more, than if I had been many years 
together at an university." 

The depth of the notes which we accidentally 
sound on the strings of nature is out of all propor- 
tion to our taught and ascertained faculty, and 
might teach us what strangers and novices we are, 
vagabond in this universe of pure power, to which 
we have only the smallest key. Herrick said : — 

•"T is not every day that I 
Fitted am to prophesy ; 
No, but when the spirit fills 
The fantastic panicles, 
Full of fire, then I write 
As the Goddess doth indite. 
Thus, enraged, my lines are hurled, 
Like the Sibyl's, through the world: 
Look how next the holy fire 
Either slakes, or doth retire ; 
So the fancy cools, — till when 
That brave spirit comes again." 

Bonaparte said : " There is no man more pusillani- 
mous than T, when I make a military plan. I mag- 
nify all the dangers, and all the possible mischances. 
I am in an agitation utterly painful. That does not 
prevent me from appearing quite serene to the per- 
sons who surround me. I am like a woman with 
child, and when my resolution is taken, all is for- 
got, except whatever can make it succeed." 

12 



250 INSPIRATION. 

There are, to be sure, certain risks in this presen- 
timent of the decisive perception, as in the use of 
ether or alcohol. 

*' Great wits to madness nearly are allied; 
Both serve to make our poverty our pride." 

Aristotle said : " ]^o great genius was ever without 
some mixture of madness, nor can anything grand 
or superior to the voice of common mortals be 
spoken except by the agitated soul." We might 
say of these memorable moments of life, that we 
were in them, not they in us. We found ourselves 
by happy fortune in an illuminated portion or me- 
teorous zone, and passed out of it again, so aloof 
was it from any will of ours. " 'T is a principle of 
war," said ]N'apoleon, " that when you can use the 
lightning, 't is better than cannon." 

How many sources of inspiration can we count ? 
As many as our affinities. But to a practical pur- 
pose we may reckon a few of these. 

1. Health is the first muse, comprising the magi- 
cal benefits of air, landscape, and bodily exercise on 
the mind. The Arabs say that "Allah does not 
count from life the days spent in the chase," that is, 
those are thrown in. Plato thought "exercise 
would almost cure a guilty conscience." Sydney 
Smith said : " You will never break down in a 
speech on the day when you have walked twelve 
miles." 

I honor health as the first muse, and sleep as 



INSPIRATION. 251 

the condition of health. Sleep benefits mainly by 
the sound health it produces ; incidentally also 
by dreams, into whose farrago a divine lesson 
is sometimes slipped. Life is in short cycles or 
periods; we are quickly tired, but we have rapid 
rallies. A man is spent by his work, starved, pros- 
trate; he v/ill not lift his hand to save his life; 
he can never think more. He sinks into deep 
sleep and wakes with renewed youth, with hope, 
courage, fertile in resources, and keen for daring 
adventure. 

** Sleep is like death, and after sleep 
The world seems new begun ; 
White thoughts stand luminous and firm, 

Like statues in the sun ; 
Refreshed from supersensuous founts. 
The soul to clearer vision mounts."-* 

A man must be able to escape from his cares and 
fears, as well as from hunger and want of sleep ; 
so that another Arabian proverb has its coarse 
truth : " When the belly is full, it says to the head. 
Sing, fellow!" The perfection of writing is when 
mind and body are both in key; when the mind 
finds perfect obedience in the body. And wine, 
uo doubt, and all fine food, as of delicate fruits, 
furnish some elemental wisdom. And the fire, too, 
as it burns in the chimney; for I fancy that my 
logs, which have grown so long in sun and wind 

* AUingham. 



252 INSPIRATION. 

by Walden, are a kind of muses. So of all tlie 
particulars of health and exercise, and fit nutri- 
ment, and tonics. Some people will tell you there 
is a great deal of poetry and fine sentiment in a 
chest of tea. 

2. The experience of writing letters is one of the 
keys to the modus of inspiration. When we have 
ceased for a long time to have any fulness of 
thoughts that once made a diary a joy as well as 
a necessity, and have come to believe that an image 
or a happy turn of expression is no longer at our 
command^ in writing a letter to a friend we may 
find that we rise to thought and to a cordial power 
of expression that costs no effort, and it seems to 
us that this facility may be indefinitely applied and 
resumed. The wealth of the mind in this respect 
of seeing is like that of a lookingrglass, which is 
never tired or worn by any multitude of objects 
which it reflects. You may carry it all round the 
world, it is ready and perfect as ever for new mil- 
lions. 

3. Another consideration, though it will not so 
much interest young men, will cheer the heart 
of older scholars, namely, that there is diurnal and 
secular rest. As there is this daily renovation 
of sensibility, so it sometimes, if rarely, happens 
that after a season of decay or eclipse, darkening 
months or years, the faculties revive to their fullest 
force. One of the best facts I know in metaphys- 



INSPIRATION. 253 

ical science is Kiebuhr's joyful record that, after 
his genius for interpreting history had failed him 
for several years, this divination returned to him. 
As this rejoiced me, so does Herbert's poem " The 
Flower." His health had broken down early, he 
had lost his muse, and in this poem he says : — 

*' And now in age I bud again, 
After so many deaths I live and write ; 
I once more smell the dew and rain, 
And relish versing : my only light. 

It cannot be 

That I am he 
On whom thy tempests fell all night." 

His poem called "The Forerunners" also has 
supreme interest. I understand " The Harbingers " 
to refer io the signs of age and decay which he 
detects in himself, not only in his constitution, but 
in his fancy and his facility and grace in writing 
verse ; and he signalizes his delight in this skill, 
and his pain that the Herricks, Lovelaces, and 
Marlows, or whoever else, should use the like gen- 
ius in language to sensual purpose, and consoles 
himself that his own faith and the divine life in 
him remain to him unchanged, unharmed. 

4. The power of the will is sometimes sublime ; 
and what is will for, if it cannot help us in emer- 
gencies ? Seneca says of an almost fatal sickness 
that befell him, " The thought of my father, who 
could not have sustained such a blow as my death. 



254 INSPIRATIOK 

restrained me; I commanded myself to live." 
Goethe said to Eckermann, "I work more easily 
when the barometer is high than when it is low. 
Since I know this, I endeavor, when the barometer 
is low, to counteract the injurious effect by greater- 
exertion, and my attempt is successful." 

" To the persevering mortal the blessed immortals 
are swift." Yes, for they know how to give you in 
one moment the solution of the riddle you have 
pondered for months. "Had I not lived with 
Mirabeau," says Dumont, "I never should have 
known all that can be done in one day, or, rather, 
in an interval of twelve hours. A day to him was 
of more value than a week or a month to others. 
To-morrow to him was not the same impostor as 
to most others." 

5. Plutarch affirms that " souls are naturally en- 
dowed with the faculty of prediction, and the chief 
cause that excites this faculty and virtue is a cer- 
tain temperature of air and winds." My anchorite 
thought it " sad that atmospheric influences should 
bring to our dust the communion of the soul with 
the Infinite." But I am glad that the atmosphere 
should be an excitant, glad to find the dull rock 
itself to be deluged with Deity, — to be theist. Chris- 
tian, poetic. The fine influences of the morning 
few can explain, but all will admit. Goethe ac- 
knowledges them in the poem in which he dislodges 
the nightingale from her place as Leader of the 
Muses. 



INSPIRATION. 255 



MUSAGETES. ' 

" Often in deep midnights 
I called on the sweet muses. 
No dawn shines, 
And no day will appear; 
But at the right hour 
The lamp brings me pious light, 
That it, instead of Aurora or Phoebus, 
May enliven my quiet industry. 
But they left me lying in sleep 
Dull, and not to be enlivened, 
And after every late morning 
Followed unprofitable days. 

** When now the Spring stirred, 
I said to the nightingales : 
* Dear nightingales, trill 
Early, 0, early before my lattice. 
Wake me out of the deep sleep 
Which mightily chains the young man.' 
But the love-filled singers 
Poured by night before my window 
Their sweet melodies, — 
Kept awake my dear soul, 
Eoused tender new longings 
In my lately touched bosom. 
And so the night passed. 
And Aurora found me sleeping ; 
Yea, hardly did the sun wake me. 
At last it has become summer. 
And at the first glimpse of morning 
The busy early fly stings me 
Out of my sweet slumber. 
Unmerciful she returns again: 
.When often the half-awake victim 



256 INSPIRATION. 

Impatiently drives her oJ0F, 

She calls hither the unscrupulous sisters, 

And from my eyelids 

Sweet sleep must depart. 

Vigorous, I spring from my couch, 

Seek the beloved Muses, 

Find them in the beech grove, 

Pleased to receive me ; 

And I thank the annoying insect 

For many a golden hour. 

Stand, then, for me, ye tormenting creatures. 

Highly praised by the poet 

As the true Musagetes." 

The French have a proverb to the effect that not 
the day only, but all things have their morning, — 
" // ifCy a qiie le matin en toutes cJioses" And it is a 
primal rule to defend your morning, to keep all its 
dews on, and with fine foresight to relieve it from 
any jangle of affairs, even from the question, Which 
task ? I remember a capital prudence of old Presi- 
dent Quincy, who told me that he never went to 
bed at night until he had laid out the studies for 
the next morning. I believe that in our good days 
a well-ordered mind has a new thought awaiting it 
every morning. And hence, eminently thoughtful 
men, from the time of Pythagoras down, have in- 
sisted on an hour of solitude every day to meet 
their own mind, and learn what oracle it has to im- 
part. If a new view of life or mind gives us joy, 
so does new arrangement. I don't know but we 
take as much delight in finding the right place for 
an old observation, as in a new thought. 



INSPIRATION. 257 

6. Solitary converse with nature ; for thence are 
ejaculated sweet and dreadful words never uttered 
in libraries. Ah! the spring days, the summer 
dawns, the October woods ! I confide that my 
reader knows these delicious secrets, has perhaps 

** Slighted Minerva's learned tongue, 
But leaped with joy when on the wind the shell of Clio rung." 

Are you poetical, impatient of trade, tired of 
labor and affairs ? Do you want Monadnoc, Agio- 
cochook, — or Helvellyn, or Plinlimmon, dear to 
English song, in your closet ? Caerleon, Provence, 
Ossian, and Cadwallon ? Tie a couple of strings 
across a board and set it in your window, and you 
have an instrument which no artist's harp can rival. 
It needs no instructed ear ; if you have sensibility, 
it admits you to sacred interiors ; it has the sadness 
of nature, yet, at the changes, tones of triumph and 
festal notes ringing out all measures of loftiness. 
" Did you never observe," says Gray, " ' while rock- 
ing winds are piping loud,' that pause, as the gust 
is recollecting itself, and rising upon the ear in a 
shrill and plaintive note, like the swell of an 
^olian harp ? I do assure you there is nothing 
in the world so like the voice of a spirit." Perhaps 
you can recall a delight like it, which spoke to the 
eye, when you have stood by a lake in the woods, 
in summer, and saw where little flaws of wind whip 
spots or patches of still water into fleets of ripples, 
so sudden, so slight, so spiritual, that it was more 

Q 



258 INSPIRATION. 

like the rippling of the Aurora Borealis, at night, 
than any spectacle of day. 

7. But the solitude of nature is not so essential 
as solitude of habit. I have found my advantage 
in going in summer to a country inn, in winter to a 
city hotel, with a task which would not prosper at 
home. I thus secured a more absolute seclusion ; 
for it is almost impossible for a housekeeper, who is 
in the country a small farmer, to exclude interrup- 
tions, and even necessary orders, though I bar out 
by system all I can, and resolutely omit, to my con- 
stant damage, all that can be omitted. At home, 
the day is cut into short strips. In the hotel, I 
have no hours to keep, no visits to make or receive, 
and I command an astronomic leisure. I forget 
rain, wind, cold, and heat. At home, I remember 
in my library the wants of the farm, and have all 
too much sympathy. I envy the abstraction of 
some scholars I have known, who could sit on a 
curbstone in State Street, put up" their back, and 
solve their problem. I have more womanly eyes. 
All the conditions must be right for my success, 
slight as that is. What untunes is as bad as what 
cripples or stuns me. ITovelty, surprise, change of 
scene, refresh the artist, — " break up the tiresome old 
roof of heaven into new forms," as Hafiz said. The 
sea-shore, and the taste of two metals in contact, 
and our enlarged powers in the presence, or rather 
at the approach and at the departure of a friend. 



INSPIRATION. 259 

and the mixture of lie in truth, and the experience 
of poetic creativeness which is not found in staying 
at home, nor yet in travelling, but in transitions 
from one to the other, which must therefore be 
adroitly managed to present as much transitional 
surface as possible, — these are the types or con- 
ditions of this power. " A ride near the sea, a sail 
near the shore," said the ancient. So Montaigne 
travelled with his books, but did not read in them. 
" La Nature aime les m^oisements" says Fourier. 

I know there is room for whims here; but in 
regard to some apparent trifles there is great agree- 
ment as to their annoyance. And the machine 
with which we are dealing is of such an inconceiv- 
able delicacy that whims also must be respected. 
Fire must lend its aid. We not only want time, 
but warm time. George Sand says, "I have no 
enthusiasm for nature which the slightest chill will 
not instantly destroy." And I remember that Tho- 
reau, with his robust will, yet found certain trifles 
disturbing the delicacy of that health which compo- 
sition exacted, — namely, the slightest irregularity, 
even to the drinking too much water on the pre- 
ceding day. Even a steel pen is a nuisance to 
some writers. Some of us may remember, years 
ago, in the English journals, the petition, signed by 
Carlyle, Browning, Tennyson, Dickens, and other 
writers in London, against the license of the organ- 
grinders, who infested the streets near their houses, 
to levy on them blackmail. 



260 INSPIRATION. 

Certain localities, as mountain-tops, the sea-side, 
the shores of rivers and rapid brooks, natural parks 
of oak and pine, where the ground is smooth and 
unencumbered, are excitants of the muse. Every 
artist knows well some favorite retirement. And 
yet the experience of some good artists has taught 
them to prefer the smallest and plainest chamber, 
with one chair and table, and with no outlook, to 
these picturesque liberties. William Blake said, 
" Natural objects always did and do weaken, deaden, 
and obliterate imagination in me." And Sir Joshua 
Eeynolds had no pleasure in Eichmond ; he used to 
say "the human face was his landscape." These 
indulgences are to be used with great caution. 
AUston rarely left his studio by day. An old 
friend took him, one fine afternoon, a spacious cir- 
cuit into the country, and he painted two or three 
pictures as the fruits of that drive. But he made 
it a rule not to go to the city on two consecutive 
days. One was rest ; more was lost time. The 
times of force must be well husbanded, and the 
wise student will remember the prudence of Sir 
Tristram in Morte d' Arthur, who, having received 
from the fairy an enchantment of six hours of 
growing strength every day, took care to fight in 
the hours when his strength increased ; since from 
noon to night his strength abated. What prudence, 
again, does every artist, every scholar, need in the 
security of his easel or his desk ! These must be 



JNSPIEATION. 261 

remote from the work of the house, and from all 
knowledge of the feet that come and go therein. 
AUston, it is said, had two or three rooms in differ- 
ent parts of Boston, where he could not be found. 
For the delicate muses lose their head, if their 
attention is once diverted. Perhaps if you were 
successful abroad in talking and dealing with men, 
you would not come back to your book-shelf and 
your task. When the spirit chooses you for its 
scribe to publish some commandment, it makes you 
odious to men, and men odious to you, and you shall 
accept that loathsomeness with joy. The moth 
must fly to the lamp, and you must solve those 
questions though you die. 

8. Conversation, which, when it is best, is a 
series of intoxications. ISTot Aristotle,- not Kant or 
Hegel, but conversation, is the right metaphysical 
professor. This is the true school of philosophy, — 
this the college where you learn what thoughts are, 
what powers lurk in those fugitive gleams, and 
what becomes of them; how they make history. 
A wise man goes to this game to play upon others, 
and to be played upon, and at least as curious to 
know what can be drawn from himself as what can 
be drawn from them. For, in discourse with a 
friend, our thought, hitherto wrapped in our con- 
sciousness, detaches itself, and allows itself to be 
seen as a thought, in a manner as new and enter- 
taining to us as to our companions. For provoca- 



262 INSPIRATION. 

tion of thought, we use ourselves and use each 
other. Some perceptions — I think the best — are 
granted to the single soul ; they come from the 
depth, and go to the depth, and are the permanent 
and controlling ones. Others it takes two to find. 
We must be warmed by the fire of sympathy to be 
brought into the right conditions and angles of 
vision. Conversation; for intellectual activity is 
contagious. We are emulous. If the tone of the 
companion is higher than ours, we delight in rising 
to it. 'Tis a historic observation that a writer 
must find an audience up to his thought, or he will 
no longer care to impart it, but will sink to their 
level, or be silent. Homer said, " When two come 
together, one apprehends before the other " ; but it 
is because one thought well that the other thinks 
better : and two men of good mind will excite each 
other's activity, each attempting still to cap the 
other's thought. In enlarged conversation we have 
suggestions that require new ways of living, new 
books, new men, new arts and sciences. By sym- 
pathy, each opens to the eloquence, and begins to 
see with the eyes of his mind. We were all lonely, 
thoughtless ; and now a principle appears to all : we 
see new relations, many truths; every mind seizes 
them as they pass ; each catches by the mane one 
of these strong coursers like horses of the prairie, 
and rides up and down in the world of the intellect. 
We live day by day under the illusion that it is the 



INSPIRATION. 263 

fact or event that imports, whilst really it is not 
that which signifies, but the use we put it to, or 
what we think of it. We esteem nations important, 
until we discover that a few individuals much more 
concern us ; then, later, that it is not at last a few 
individuals, or any sacred heroes, but the lowliness, 
the outpouring, the large equality to truth, of a 
single mind, — -as if in the narrow walls of a human 
heart the whole realm of truth, the world of morals, 
the tribunal by which the universe is judged, found 
room to exist. 

9. New poetry ; by which I mean chiefly, old 
poetry that is new to the reader. I have heard 
from persons who had practice in rhyming, that it 
was sufficient to set them on writing verses, to read 
any original poetry. What is best in literature is 
the affirming, prophesying, spermatic words of men- 
making poets. Only that is poetry which cleanses 
and mans me. 

Words used in a new sense, and figuratively, dart 
a delightful lustre ; and every word admits a new 
use, and hints ulterior meanings. We have not 
learned the law of the mind, — cannot control and 
domesticate at will the high states of contempla- 
tion and continuous thought. "Neither by sea nor 
by land," said Pindar, "canst thou find the way 
to the Hyperboreans"; neither by idle wishing, 
nor by rule of three or rule of thumb. Yet I 
find a mitigation or solace by providing always 



264 INSPIEATIOK 

a good book for my journeys, as Horace or Mar- 
tial or Goethe, — some book which lifts me quite 
out of prosaic surroundings, and from which I 
draw some lasting knowledge. A Greek epigram 
out of the anthology, a verse of Herrick or Love- 
lace, are in harmony both with sense and spirit. 

You shall not read newspapers, nor politics, nor 
novels, nor Montaigne, nor the newest French book. 
You may read Plutarch, Plato, Plotinus, Hindoo my- 
thology, and ethics. You may read Chaucer, Shak- 
speare, Ben Jonson, Milton, — and Milton's prose 
as his verse ; read Collins and Gray ; read Hafiz 
and the Trouveurs ; nay, Welsh and British mythol- 
ogy of Arthur, and (in your ear) Ossian; fact- 
books, which all geniuses prize as raw material, 
and as antidote to verbiage and false poetry. Pact- 
books, if the facts be well and thoroughly told, are 
much more nearly allied to poetry than many 
books are that are written in rhyme. Only our 
newest knowledge works as a source of inspiration 
and thought, as only the outmost layer of liber on 
the tree. Books of natural science, especially those 
written by the ancients,— geography, botany, agricul- 
ture, explorations of the sea, of meteors, of astron- 
omy, — all the better if written without literary 
aim or ambition. Every book is good to read 
which sets the reader in a working mood. The 
deep book, no matter how remote the subject, helps 
us best. 



INSPIRATION. 265 

Neither are these all the sources, nor can I name 
all. The receptivity is rare. The occasions or pre- 
disposing circumstances I could never tabulate ; but 
now one, now another landscape, form, color, or 
companion, or perhaps one kind of sounding word 
or syllable, " strikes the electric chain with which 
we are darkly bound," and it is impossible to detect 
and wilfully repeat the fine conditions to which we 
have owed our happiest frames of mind. The day 
is good in which we have had the most perceptions. 
The analysis is the more difficult, because poppy- 
leaves are strewn when a generalization is made ; 
for I can never remember the circumstances to 
which I owe it, so as to repeat the experiment or 
put inyself in the conditions. 

** 'T is the most difficult of tasks to keep 
Heights which the soul is competent to gain." 

I value literary biography for the hints it fur- 
nishes from so many- scholars, in so many countries, 
of what hygiene, what ascetic, what gymnastic, 
what social practices their experience suggested and 
approved. They are, for the most part, men who 
needed only a little wealth. Large estates, political 
relations, great hospitalities, would have been im- 
pediments to them. They are men whom a book 
could entertain, a new thought intoxicate, and hold 
them prisoners for years perhaps. Aubrey and 
Burton and Wood tell me incidents which I find 
not insignificant. 

12 



266 ' mspiRATiON. 

These are some hints towards what is in all 
education a chief necessity, the right government, 
or, shall I not say, the right obedience to the powers 
of the human soul. Itself is the dictator; the 
mind itself the awful oracle. All our power, all 
our happiness, consists in our reception of its hints, 
which ever become clearer and grander as they are 
obeyed. 



GREATNESS. 



GEEATNESS. 



There is a prize which we are all aiming at, and 
the more power and goodness we have, so much more 
the energy of that aim. Every human being has^ a 
right to it, and in the pursuit we do not stand in each 
other's way. For it has a long scale of degrees, a 
wide variety of views, and every aspirant, by his 
success in the pursuit, does not hinder but helps his 
competitors. I might call it completeness, but that 
is later, — perhaps adjourned for ages. I prefer to 
call it Greatness. It is the fulfilment of a natural 
tendency in each man. It is a fruitful study. It 
is the best tonic to the young soul. And no man is 
unrelated; therefore we admire eminent men, not for 
themselves, but as representatives. It is very cer- 
tain that we ought not to be, and shall not be con- 
tented with any goal we have reached. Our aim is 
no less than greatness ; . that which invites aU, 
belongs to us all, — to which we are all sometimes 
untrue, cowardly, faithless, but of which we never 
quite -despair, and which, in every sane moment, we 
resolve to make our own. It is also the only plat- 



270 GEEATNESS. 

form on which all men can meet. What anecdotes 
of any man do we wish to hear or read ? Only the 
best. Certainly not those in which he was degrad- 
ed to the level of dulness or vice, but those in 
which he rose above all competition by obeying a 
light that shone to him alone. This is the worthi- 
est history of the world. 

Greatness, — what is it ? Is there not some in- 
jury to us, some insult in the word? What we 
commonly call greatness is only such in our bar- 
barous or infant experience. 'Tis not the soldier, 
not Alexander or Bonaparte or Count Moltke surely, 
who represent the highest force of mankind; not 
the strong hand, but wisdom and civility, the cre- 
ation of laws, institutions, letters, and art. These 
we call by distinction the humanities ; these, and 
not the strong arm and brave heart, which are also 
indispensable to their defence. For the scholars 
represent the intellect, by which man is man ; the 
intellect and the moral sentiment, — which in the 
last analysis can never be separated. Who can 
doubt the potency of an individual mind, who sees 
the shock given to torpid races — torpid for ages — 
by Mahomet ; a vibration propagated over Asia and 
Africa? What of Menu? what of Buddha ? ofShak- 
speare? of IsTewton? of Franklin? 

There are certain points of identity in which 
these masters agree. Self-respect is the early form 
in which greatness appears. The man in the tav- 



GREATNESS. 271 

ern maintains his opinion, though the whole crowd 
takes the other side ; we are at once drawn to him. 
The porter or truckman refuses a reward for finding 
your purse, or for pulling you drowning out of the 
river. Thereby, with the service, you have got a 
moral lift. You say of some new person, That 
man will go far, — for you see in his manners that 
the recognition of him by others is not necessary to 
him. And what a bitter-sweet sensation when we 
have gone to pour out our acknowledgment of a 
man's nobleness, and found him quite indifferent to 
our good opinion ! They may well fear Fate who 
have any infirmity of habit or aim; but he who 
rests on what he is, has a destiny above destiny, 
and can make mouths at Fortune. If a man's cen- 
trality is incomprehensible to us, we may as well 
snub the sun. There is something in Archimedes 
or in Luther or Samuel Johnson that needs no pro- 
tection. There is somewhat in the true scholar 
which he cannot be laughed out of, nor be terrified 
or bought off from. Stick to your own ; don't in- 
culpate yourself in the local, social, or national 
crime, but follow the path your genius traces like 
the galaxy of heaven, for you to walk in. 

A sensible, person will soon see the folly and 
wickedness of thinking to please. Sensible men 
are very rare. A sensible man does not brag, 
avoids introducing the names of his creditable 
companions, omits himself as habitually as another 



GEEATNESS. 

man obtrudes himseK in the discourse, and is con- 
tent with putting his fact or theme simply on its 
ground. You shall not tell me that your com- 
mercial house, your partners, or yourself are of 
importance; you shall not tell me that you have 
learned to know men; you shall make me feel 
that; your saying so unsays it. You shall not 
enumerate your brilliant acquaintances, nor tell me 
by their titles what books you have read. I am 
to infer that you keep good company by your 
better information and manners, and to infer your 
reading from the wealth and accuracy of your con- 
versation. 

Young men think that the manly character re- 
quires that they should go to California, or to India, 
or into the army. When they have learned that 
the parlor and the college and the counting-room 
demand as much courage as the sea or the camp, 
they will be willing to consult their own strength 
and education in their choice of place. 

There are to each function and department of 
nature supplementary men: to geology, sinewy, 
out-of-doors men, with a taste for mountains and 
rocks, a quick eye for differences and for chemical 
changes. Give such, first, a course in chemistry, 
and then a geological survey. Others find a charm 
and a profession in the natural history of man and 
the mammalia, or related animals ; others in orni- 
thology, or fishes, or insects ; others in plants ; 



GREATNESS. 273 

others in the elements of which the whole world is 
made. These lately have stimulus to their study 
through the extraordinary revelations of the spec- 
troscope that the sun and the planets are made in 
part or in whole of the same elements as the earth 
is. Then there is the boy w^ho is born with a 
taste for the sea, and must go thither if he has to 
run away from his father's house to the forecastle ; 
another longs for travel in foreign lands; another 
will be a lawyer ; another, an astronomer ; another, 
a painter, sculptor, architect, or engineer. Thus 
there is not a piece of nature in any kind, but a 
man is born, who, as his genius opens, aims slower 
or faster to dedicate himself to that. Then there is 
the poet, the philosopher, the politician, the orator, 
the clergyman, the physician. 'T is gratifying to 
see this adaptation of man to the world, and to 
every part and particle of it. 

Many readers remember that Sir Humphry Davy 
said, when he was praised for his important discov- 
eries, "My best discovery was Michael Faraday." 
In 1848 I had the privilege of hearing Professor 
Faraday deliver, in the Koyal Institution in Lon- 
don, a lecture on what he called Diamagnetism, — by 
which he meant cross-magnetism ; and he showed us 
various experiments on certain gases, to prove that 
whilst, ordinarily, magnetism of steel is from north 
to south, in other substances, gases, it acts from 
east to west. And further experiments led him to 



274 GEEATNESS. 

the theory that every cheniical substance would be 
found to have its own, and a different, polarity. 
I do not know how far his experiments and others 
have been pushed in this matter, but one fact is 
clear to me, that diamagnetism is a law of the 
mind, to the full extent of Faraday's idea ; namely, 
that every mind has a new compass, a new north, a 
new direction of its own, differencing its genius and 
aim from every other mind ; — as every man, with 
whatever family resemblances, has a new counte- 
nance, new manner, new voice, new thoughts, and 
new character. Whilst he shares with all mankind 
the gift of reason, and the moral sentiment, there is 
a teaching for him from within, which is leading 
him in a new path, and, the more it is trusted, 
separates and signalizes him, while it makes him 
more important and necessary to society. We call 
this specialty the lias of each individual. And 
none of us will ever accomplish anything excellent 
or commanding except when he listens to this 
whisper which is heard by him alone. Swedenborg 
called it the proprium, — not a thought shared with 
others, but constitutional to the man. A point of 
education that I can never too much insist upon is 
this tenet, that every individual man has a bias 
which he must obey, and that it is only as he feels 
and obeys this that he rightly develops and attains 
his legitimate power in the world. It is his mag- 
netic needle, which points always in one direction 



GKEATNESS. 275 

to his proper path, with more or less variation from 
any other man's. He is never happy nor strong 
raitil he finds it, keeps it ; learns to be at home with 
himself; learns to watch the delicate hints and 
insights that come to him, and to have the entire 
assurance of his own mind. And in this self- 
respect, or hearkening to the privatest oracle, he 
consults his ease, I may say, or need never be at 
a loss. In morals this is conscience ; in intellect, 
genius ; in practice, talent ; — not to imitate or sur- 
pass a particular man in his way, but to bring out 
your own new way ; to each his own method, style, 
wit, eloquence. \ 'T is easy for a commander to com- 
mand. Clinging to Nature, or to that province of 
nature which he knows, he makes no mistakes, but 
works after her laws and at her own pace, so that 
his doing, which is perfectly natural, ajDpears mi- 
raculous to dull people. Montluc, the great Mar- 
shal of France, says of the Genoese admiral, Andrew 
Doria, " It seemed as if the sea stood in awe of 
this man." And a kindred genius, N^elson, said, " I 
feel that I am fitter to do the action than to de- 
scribe it." Therefore I will say that another trait 
of greatness is facility. 

This necessity of resting on the real, of speaking 
your private thought and experience, few young 
men apprehend. Set ten men to write their journal 
for one day, and nine of them will leave out their 
thought, or proper result, — that is, their net experi- 



276 GEEATNESS. 

ence, — and lose themselves in misreporting the sup- 
posed experience of other people. Indeed, I think 
it an essential caution to young writers, that they 
shall not in their discourse leave out the one thing 
which the discourse was written to say. Let that 
belief which you hold alone, have free course. I 
have observed that, in all public speaking, the rule 
of the orator begins, not in the array of his facts, 
but when his deep conviction, and the right and 
necessity he. feels to convey that conviction to his 
audience, — when these shine and burn in his ad- 
dress ; when the thought which he stands for gives 
its own authority to him, — adds to him a grander 
personality, gives him valor, breadth, and new in- 
tellectual power, so that not he, but mankind, seems 
to speak through his lips. There is a certain trans- 
figuration ; all great orators have it, and men who 
wish to be orators simulate it. 

If we should ask ourselves what is this self-re- 
spect, — it would carry us to the highest problems. 
It is our practical perception of the Deity in man. 
It has its deep foundations in religion. If you have 
ever known a good mind among the Quakers, you 
will have found that is the element of their faith. 
As they express it, it might be thus : " I do not pre- 
tend to any commandment or large revelation, but if 
at any time I form some plan, propose a journey, or 
a course of conduct, I perhaps find a silent obsta- 
cle in my mind that I cannot account for. Very 



GEEATNESS. 277 

well, — I let it lie, thinking it may pass away, "but 
if it do not pass away, I yield to it, obey it. You 
ask me to describe it. I cannot describe it. It is 
not an oracle, nor an angel, nor a dream, nor a law ; 
it is too simple to be described, it is but a grain of 
mustard-seed, but such as it is, it is something 
which the contradiction of all mankind could not 
shake, and which the consent of all mankind could 
not confirm." 

You are rightly fond of certain books or men 
that you have found to excite your reverence and 
emulation. But none of these can compare with 
the greatness of that counsel which is open to you 
in happy solitude. I mean that there is for you 
the following of an inward leader, — a slow dis- 
crimination that there is for each a Best Counsel 
which enjoins the fit word and the fit act for every 
moment. And the path of each pursued leads to 
greatness. How grateful to find in man or woman 
a new emphasis of their own. 

But if the first rule is to obey your native bias, 
to accept that work for wmch you were inwardly 
formed, the second rule is concentration, which 
doubles its force. Thus if you are a scholar, be 
that. The same laws hold for you as for the 
laborer. The shoemaker makes a good shoe because 
he makes nothing else. Let the student mind his 
own charge ; sedulously wait every morning for the 
news concerning the structure of the world which 
the spirit will give him. ' ■ 



278 GREATNESS. 

'No way has been found for making heroism easy, 
even for the scholar. Labor, iron labor, is for him. 
The world was created as an audience for him ; the 
atoms of which it is made are opportunities. Eead 
the performance of Bentley, of Gibbon, of Cuvier, 
Geoffroy St. Hilaire, Laplace. "He can toil terri- 
bly," said Cecil of Sir Walter Ealeigh. These few 
words sting and bite and lash us when we are friv- 
olous. Let us get out of the way of their blows, by 
making them true of ourselves. There is so much 
to be done that we ought to begin quickly to bestir 
ourselves. This day-labor of ours, we confess, has 
hitherto a certain emblematic air, like the annual 
ploughing and sowing of the Emperor of China. 
Let us make it an honest sweat. Let the scholar 
measure his valor by his power to cope with intel- 
lectual giants. Leave others to count votes and cal- 
culate stocks. His courage is to weigh Plato, judge 
Laplace, know I^ewton, Faraday, judge of Darwin, 
criticise Kant and Swedenborg, and on all these 
arouse the central courage of insight. The schol- 
ar's courage should be as terrible as the Cid's, 
though it grow out of spiritual nature, not out of 
brawn. Nature, when she adds difficulty, adds 
brain. 

With this respect to the bias of the individ- 
ual mind, add, what is consistent with it, the 
most catholic receptivity for the genius of others. 
The day will come when no badge, uniform, or 



GREATNESS. 279 

medal will be worn ; when the eye, which carries 
in it planetary influences from all the stars, wiU 
indicate rank fast enough by exerting power. For 
it is true that the stratification of crusts in geol- 
ogy is not more precise than the degrees of rank 
in minds. A man will say : ' I am born to this 
position ; I must take it, and neither you nor I 
can help or hinder me. Surely, then, I need not 
fret myself to guard my own dignity.' The great 
man loves the conversation or the book that con- 
victs him, not that which soothes or flatters him. 
He makes himself of no reputation; he conceals 
his learning, conceals his charity. Tor the highest 
wisdom does not concern itself with particular 
men, but with man enamored with the law and 
the Eternal Source. Say with Antoninus, " If the 
picture is good, who cares who made it? What 
matters it by whom the good is done, by yourself 
or another ? " If it is the ti^ith, what matters who 
said it ? If it was right, what signifies who did 
it ? All greatness is in degree, and there is more 
above than below. Where were your own intel- 
lect, if greater had not lived ? And do you know 
what the right meaning of Eame is ? 'T is that 
sympathy, rather that fine element by which the 
good become partners of the greatness of their 
superiors. 

Extremes meet, and there is no better example 
than the haughtiness of humility. No aristocrat, 



280 GREATNESS. 

no prince born to the purple, can begin to compare 
with the self-respect of the saint. Why is he so 
lowly, but that he knows that he can well afford it, 
resting on the largeness of God in him ? I have 
read in an old book that Barcena, the Jesuit, con- 
fessed to another of his order that when the Devil 
appeared to him in his cell, one night, out of his 
profound humility he rose up to meet him, and 
prayed him to sit down in his chair, for he was 
more worthy to sit there than himself. 

Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar ? 
It is this : Every man I meet is my master in some 
point, and in that I learn of him. The populace 
will say, with Home Tooke, " If you would be pow- 
erful, pretend to be powerful." I prefer to say, 
with the old Hebrew prophet, " Seekest thou great 
things? — seek them not"; or, what was said of 
• the Spanish prince, " The more you took from him, 
the greater he appeared," Plus 07i lui Ste, ;plus il est 
grand. 

Scintillations of greatness appear here and 
there in men of unequal character, and are by 
no means confined to the cultivated and so-called 
moral class. 'T is easy to draw traits from Napo- 
leon, who was not generous nor just, but was intel- 
lectual, and knew the law of things. Napoleon 
commands our respect by his enormous self-trust, 
— the habit of seeing with his own eyes, never the 
surface, but to the heart of the matter, whether it 



GREATNESS. 281 

was a road, a cannon, a character, an officer, or a 
king, — and by the speed and security of his action 
in the premises, always new. He has left a library 
of manuscripts, a multitude of sayings, every one 
of widest application. He was a man who always 
fell on his feet. When one of his favorite schemes 
missed, he had the faculty of taking up his genius, 
as he said, and of carrying it somewhere else. 
"Whatever they may tell you, believe that one 
fights with cannon as with fists ; when once the fire 
is begun, the least want of ammunition renders 
what you have done already useless." I find it 
easy to translate all his technics into all of mine, 
and his official advices are to me more literary and 
philosophical than the memoirs of the Academy. 
His advice to his brother. King Joseph of Spain, 
was : " I have only one counsel for you, — Be 
Master." Depth of intellect relieves even the 
ink of crime with a fringe of light. We perhaps 
look on its crimes as experiments of a universal 
student; as he may read any book who reads all 
books, and as the English judge in old times, when 
learning was rare, forgave a culprit who could read 
and write. 'Tis difficult to find greatness pure. 
Well, I please myself with its diffusion, — to find a 
spark of true fire amid much corruption. It is 
some guaranty, I hope, for the health of the soul 
which has this generous blood. How many men, 
detested in contemporary hostile history, of whom, 



282 GREATNESS. 

now that the mists have rolled away, we have 
learned to correct our old estimates, and to see 
them as, on the whole, instruments of great benefit. 
Diderot was no model, but unclean as the society 
in which he lived ; yet was he the best-natured man 
in France, and would help any wretch at a pinch. 
His humanity knew no bounds. A poor scribbler 
who had written a lampoon against him, and wished 
to dedicate it to a pious Due d'Orleans, came with 
it in his poverty to Diderot, and Diderot, pitying 
the creature, wrote the dedication for him, and so 
raised five-and-twenty louis to save his famishing 
lampooner alive. 

Meantime we hate snivelling. I do not wish you 
to surpass others in any narrow or professional or 
monkish way. We like the natural greatness of 
health and wild power. I confess that I am as 
much taken by it in boys, and sometimes in 
people not normal, nor educated, nor presentable, 
nor church-members, — even in persons open to 
the suspicion of irregular and immoral living, — in 
Bohemians, — as in more orderly examples. For 
we must remember that in the lives of soldiers, 
sailors, and men of large adventure, many of the 
stays and guards of our household life are wanting, 
and yet the opportunities and incentives to sublime 
daring and performance are often close at hand. 
We must have some charity for the sense of the 
people which admires natural power, and will elect 



GREATNESS. 283 

it over virtuous men who have less. It has this 
excuse, that natural is really allied to moral power, 
and may always be expected to approach it by its 
own instincts. Intellect at least is not stupid, and 
will see the force of morals over men, if it does not 
itself obey. Henry YII. of England was a wise 
king. When Gerald, Earl of Kildare, who was in 
rebellion against him, was brought to London, and 
examined before the Privy Council, one said, ''All 
Ireland cannot govern this Earl." " Then let this 
Earl govern all Ireland," replied the IQng. 

'T is noted of some scholars, like Swift, and Gib- 
bon and Donne, that they pretended to vices which 
they had not, so much did they hate hypocrisy. 
"William Blake, the artist, frankly says, "I never 
knew a bad man in whom there was not something 
very good." Bret Harte has pleased himself with 
noting and recording the sudden virtue blazing in 
the wild reprobates of the ranches and mines of 
California. 

Men are ennobled by morals and by intellect ; but 
those two elements know each other and always 
beckon to each other, until at last they meet in the 
man, if he is to be truly great. The man who sells 
you a lamp shows you that the flame of oil, which 
contented you before, casts a strong shade in the 
path of the petroleum which he lights behind it; 
and this again casts a shadow in the path of the 
electric light. So does intellect when brought into 



284 GREATNESS. 

the presence of character ; character puts out that 
light. Goethe, in his correspondence with his 
Grand Duke of Weimar, does not shine. We can 
see that the Prince had the advantage of the Olym- 
pian genius. It is more plainly seen in the corre- 
spondence between Yoltaire and Frederick of Prussia. 
Voltaire is brilliant, nimble, and various, but Fred- 
erick has the superior tone. But it is curious that 
Byron writes down to Scott ; Scott writes up to him. 
The Greeks surpass all men till they face the Eo- 
mans, when Eoman character prevails over Greek 
genius. Whilst degrees of intellect interest only 
classes of men 'who pursue the same studies, as 
chemists or astronomers, mathematicians or lin- 
guists, and have no attraction for the crowd, there 
are always men who have a more catholic genius, 
are really great as men, and inspire universal en- 
thusiasm. A great style of hero draws equally all 
classes, all the extremes of society, till we say the 
very dogs believe in him. We have had such ex- 
amples in this country, in Daniel Webster, Henry 
Clay, and the seamen's preacher, Father Taylor ; in 
England, Charles James Fox ; in Scotland, Eobert 
Burns ; and in France,^ though it is less intelligible 
to us, Voltaire. Abraham Lincoln is perhaps the 
most remarkable example of this class that we have 
seen, — a man who was at home and welcome with 
the humblest, and with a spirit and a practical vein 
in the times of terror that commanded the admira- 



GREATNESS. 285 

tion of the wisest. His heart was as great as the 
world, but there was no room in it to hold the mem- 
ory of a wrong. 

These may serve as local examples to indicate a 
magnetism which is probably known better and 
finer to each scholar in the little Olympus of his 
own favorites, and which makes him require genial- 
ity and humanity in his heroes. What are these 
but the promise and the preparation of a day when 
the air of the world shall be purified by nobler soci- 
ety ; when the measure of greatness shall be use- 
fulness in the highest sense, — greatness consisting 
in truth, reverence, and good- will ?' 

Life is made of illusions, and a very common one 
is the opinion you hear expressed in every village : 
'0 yes, if I lived in N'ew York or Philadelphia, 
Cambridge or 'New Haven or Boston or Andover 
there might be fit society; but it happens that 
there are^ no fine young men, no superior women 
in my town.' You may hear this every day ; but 
it is a shallow remark. Ah ! have you yet to learn 
that the eye altering alters all; "that the world 
is an echo which returns to each of us what we 
say " ? 'T is not examples of greatness, but sen- 
sibility to see them, that is wanting. The good 
botanist will find flowers between the street .pave- 
ments, and any man filled with an idea or a pur- 
pose will find examples and illustrations and coad- 
jutors wherever he goes. Wit is a magnet to find 



286 GEEATNESS. 

wit, and character to find character. Do you not 
know that people are as those with whom they 
converse ? And if all or any are heavy to rbe, 
that fact accuses me. Why complain, as if a man's 
debt to his inferiors were not at least equal to his 
debt to his superiors ? If men were equals, the 
waters would not move ; but the difference of level 
which makes Magara a cataract, makes eloquence, 
indignation, poetry, in him who finds there is much 
to communicate. With self-respect, then, there 
must be in the aspirant the strong fellow-feeling, 
the humanity, which makes men of all classes 
warm to him as their leader and representative. 

We are thus forced to express our instinct of the 
truth, by exposing the failures of experience. The 
man whom we have not seen, in whom no regard 
of self degraded the adorer of the laws, — who by 
governing himself governed others; sportive in 
manner, but inexorable in act ; who sees longevity 
in his cause ; whose aim is always distinct to him ; 
who is suffered to be liimseK in society ; who car- 
ries fate in his eye ; — he it is whom we seek, en- 
couraged in every good hour that here or hereafter 
he shall be found. 



IMMORTALITY. 



IMMORTALITY. 

In the year 626 of our era, when Edwin, the 
Anglo-Saxon king, was deliberating on receiving 
the Christian missionaries, one of his nobles said 
to him: "The present life of man, king, com- 
pared with that space of time beyond, of which 
we have no certainty, reminds me of one of your 
winter feasts, where you sit with your generals and 
ministers. The hearth blazes in the middle and a 
grateful heat is spread around, while storms of rain 
and snow are raging without. Driven by the chill- 
ing tempest, a little sparrow enters at one door and 
flies delighted around us till it departs through the 
other. Whilst it stays in our mansion it feels not 
the winter storm ; but when this short moment of 
happiness has been enjoyed, it is forced again into 
the same dreary tempest from which it had escaped, 
and we behold it no more. Such is the life of man, 
and we are as ignorant of the state which preceded 
our present existence as of that which will follow 
it. Things being so I feel that if this new faith 
can give us more certainty, it deserves to be re- 
ceived." 

13 s 



290 IMMORTALITY. 

In the first records of a nation in any degree 
thoughtful and cultivated, some belief in the life 
beyond life would of course be suggested. The 
Egyptian people furnish us the earliest details of 
an established civilization, and I read, in the second 
book of Herodotus, this memorable sentence : " The 
Egyptians are the first of mankind who have af- 
firmed the immortality of the soul." Nor do I read 
it with less interest, that the historian connects it 
presently with the doctrine of metempsychosis ; for 
I know well that, where this belief once existed, it 
would necessarily take a base form for the savage 
and a pure form for the wise ; — so that I only look 
on the counterfeit as a proof that the genuine faith 
had been there. The credence of men, more than 
race or climate, makes their manners and customs ; 
and the history of religion may be read in the 
forms of sepulture. There never was a time when 
the doctrine of a future life was not held. Morals 
must be enjoined, but among rude men moral judg- 
ments were rudely figured under the forms of dogs 
and wliips, or of an easier and more plentiful life 
after death. And as the savage could not detach 
in his mind the life of the soul from the body, he 
took great care for his body. Thus the whole life 
of man in the first ages was ponderously determined 
on death; and, as we know, the polity of the 
Egyptians, the by-laws of towns, of streets and 
houses, respected burial. It made every man an 



IMMORTALITY. 291 

undertaker, and the priesthood a senate of sextons. 
Every palace was a door to a pyramid ; a king or 
rich man was a pyramidaire. The labor of races 
was spent on the excavation of catacombs. The 
chief end of man being to be bnried well, the arts 
most in request were masonry and embalming, to 
give imperishability to the corpse. 

The Greek, with his perfect senses and percep- 
tions, had quite another philosophy. He loved life 
and delighted in beauty. He set his wit and taste, 
like elastic gas, under these mountains of stone, 
and lifted them. He drove away the embalmers ; 
he built no more of those doleful mountainous 
tombs. He adorned death, brought wreaths of 
parsley and laurel ; made it bright with games of 
strength and skill, and chariot-races. He looked at 
death only as the distributor of imperishable glory. 
Nothing can excel the beauty of his sarcophagus. 
He carried his arts to Eome, and built his beautiful ' 
tombs at Pompeii. The poet Shelley says of these 
delicately carved white marble cells, "they seem 
not so much tombs, as voluptuous chambers for im- 
mortal spirits." In the same spirit the modern 
Greeks, in their songs, ask that they may be buried 
where the sun can see them, and that a little win- 
dow may be cut in the sepulchre, from which the 
swallow might be seen when it comes back in the 
spring. 

Christianity brought a new wisdom. But learn- 



292 IMMOHTALITY. 

ing depends on the learner, l^o more truth can be 
conveyed than the popular mind can bear ; and the 
barbarians who received the cross took the doctrine 
of the resurrection as the Egyptians took it. It 
was an affair of the body, and narrowed again by 
the fury of sect ; so that grounds were sprinkled 
with holy water to receive only orthodox dust ; and 
to keep the body still more sacredly safe for resur- 
rection, it was put into the walls of the church : 
and the churches of Europe are really sepulchres. 
I read at Melrose Abbey the inscription on the 
ruined gate : — 

" The Earth goes on the Earth glittering with gold ; 
The Earth goes to the Earth sooner than it should ; 
The Earth builds on the Earth castles and towers ; 
The Earth says to the Earth, All this is ours. " 

Meantime the true disciples saw through the letter 
the doctrine of eternity which dissolved the poor 
corpse and nature also, and gave grandeur to the 
passing hour. The most remarkable step in the re- 
ligious history of recent ages is_ that made by the 
genius of Swedenborg, who described the moral fac- 
ulties and affections of man, with the hard realism 
of an astronomer describing the suns and planets 
of our system, and explained his opinion of the his- 
tory an-d destiny of souls in a narrative form, as 
of one who had gone in a trance into the society of 
other worlds. Swedenborg described an intelligible 
heaven, by continuing the like employments in the 



IMMOETALITY. 293 

like circumstances as those we know, — men in so- 
cieties, in houses, towns, trades, entertainments, — 
continuations of our earthly experience. We shall 
pass to the future existence as we enter into an 
agreeable dream. All nature will accompany us 
there. Milton anticipated the leading thought of 
Swedenborg, when he wrote, in " Paradise Lost,"— 

''Wliatif Eartli 
Be "but the shadow of Heaven, and things therein 
Each to the other like more than on earth is thought ? " 

Swedenborg had a vast genius, and announced 
many things true and admirable, though always 
clothed in somewhat sad and Stygian colors. These 
truths, passing out of his system into general circu- 
lation, are now met with every day, qualifying the 
views and creeds of all churches, and of men of no 
church. And I think we are all aware of a revo- 
lution in opinion. Sixty years ago, the books read, 
the sermons and prayers heard, the habits of thought 
of religious persons, were all directed on death. All 
were under the shadow of Calvinism and of the Eo- 
man Catholic purgatory, and death was dreadful. 
The emphasis of all the good books given to young 
people was on death. We were all taught that we 
were born to die ; and over that, all the terrors that 
theology could gather from savage nations were added 
to increase the gloom. A great change has occurred. 
Death is seen as a natural event, and is met with 



294 IMMOETALITY. 

firmness. A wise man in our time caused to be writ- 
ten on his tomb, " Think on living." That inscrip- 
tion describes a progress in opinion. Cease from 
this antedating of your experience. Sufi&cient to 
to-day are the duties of to-day. Don't waste life 
in doubts and fears; spend yourself on the work 
before you, well assured that the right performance 
of this hour's duties will be the best preparation 
for the hours or ages that follow it. 

"The name of death was never terrible 
To him that knew to live." 

A man of thought is willing to die, willing to 
live ; I suppose, because he has seen the thread on 
which the beads are strung, and perceived that it 
reaches up and down, existing quite independently 
of the present illusions. A man of affairs is afraid 
to die, is pestered with terrors, because he has not 
this vision, and is the victim of those who have 
moulded the religious doctrines into some neat and 
plausible system, as Calvinism, Eomanism, or Swe- 
denborgism, for household use. It is the fear of 
the young bird to trust its wings. The experiences 
of the soul will fast outgrow this alarm. The say- 
ing of Marcus Antoninus it were hard to mend : 
" It were well to die if there be gods, and sad to 
live if there be none." I think all sound minds 
rest on a certain preliminary conviction, namely, 
that if it be best that conscious personal life shall 
continue, it will continue ; if not best, then it will 



IMMORTALITY. 295 

not : and we, if we saw the whole, should of course 
see that it was better so. Schiller said, " What is so 
universal as death, must be benefit." A friend of 
Michel Angelo saying to him that his constant labor 
for art must make him think of death with regret, 
" By no means," he said ; " for if life be a pleasure, 
yet since death also is sent by the hand of the same 
Master, neither should that displease us." Plutarch, 
in Greece, has a deep faith that the doctrine of the 
Divine Providence and that of the immortality of 
the soul rest on one and' the same basis. Hear 
the opinion of Montesquieu: "If the immortality 
of the soul were an error, I should be sorry not 
to believe it. I avow that I am not so humble 
as the atheist ; I know not how they think, but for 
me, I do not wish to exchange the idea of immor- 
tality against that of the beatitude of one day. 
I ' delight in believing myself as immortal as God 
himself. Independently of revealed ideas, meta- 
physical ideas give me a vigorous hope of my eter- 
nal well-being, which I would never renounce."* 

I was lately told of young children who feel a 
certain terror at the assurance of life without end. 
"What ! wiU it never stop ?" the child said ; " what ! 
never die ? never, never ? It makes me feel so 
tired." And I have in mind the expression of an 
older believer, who once said to me, " The thought 
that this frail being is never to end is so over- 

* Pensees Diverses, p. 223. 



296 IMMOETALITY. 

whelming that my only shelter is God's presence." 
This disquietude only marks the transition. The 
healthy state of mind is the love of life. What is 
so good, let it endure. 

I find that what is called great and powerful life, 
— the administration of large affairs, in commerce, 
in the courts, in the state, — is prone to develop 
narrow and special talent; hut, unless combined 
with a certain contemplative turn, a taste for ab- 
stract truth, for the moral laws, — does not build 
up faith, or lead to content. There is a profound 
melancholy at the base of men of active and pow- 
erful talent, seldom suspected. Many years ago, 
there were two men in the United States Senate, 
both of whom are now dead. I have seen them 
both ; one of them I personally knew. Both were 
men of distinction, and took an active part in the 
politics of their day and generation. They were 
men of intellect, and one of them, at a later period, 
gave to a friend this anecdote : He said that when 
he entered the Senate he became in a short time 
intimate with one of his colleagues, and, though 
attentive enough to the routine of public duty, they 
daily returned to each other, and spent much time 
in conversation on the immortality of the soul, and 
other intellectual questions, and cared for little else. 
When my friend at last left Congress, they parted, 
his colleague remaining there, and, as .their homes 
were widely distant from each other, it chanced 



IMMORTALITY. 297 

that lie never met him again, until, twenty-five 
years afterwards, they saw each other, through open 
doors, at a distance, in a crowded reception at the 
President's house in Washington. Slowly they ad- 
vanced towards each other, as they could, through 
the brilliant company, and at last ' met, — said 
nothing, but shook hands long and cordially. At 
last his friend said, " Any light, Albert ? " " !N"one," 
replied Albert. " Any light, Lewis ? " " None," re- 
plied he. They looked in each other's eyes silently, 
gave one more shake each to the hand he held, and 
thus parted for the last time. Now I should say 
that the impulse which drew these minds to this 
inquiry through so many j^ears was a better affirma- 
tive evidence than their failure to find a confirma- 
tion was negative. I ought to add that, though 
men of good minds, they were both pretty strong 
materialists in their daily aims and way of life. I 
admit that you shall find a good deal of scepticism 
in the streets and hotels and places of coarse amuse- 
ment. But that is only to say that the practical 
faculties are faster developed than the spiritual. 
Where there is depravity there is a slaughter-house 
style of thinking. One argument of future life is 
the recoil of the mind in such coriipany, — our pain 
at every sceptical statement. The sceptic affirms 
that the universe is a nest of boxes with nothing 
in the last box. All laughter at man is bitter, and 
puts us out, of good activity. When Bonaparte in- 



298 IMMOETALITY. 

sisted that the heart is one of the entrails ; that it is 
the pit of the stomach that moves the world ; — do 
we thank him for the gracious instruction ? Our 
disgust is the protest of human nature against a lie. 

The ground of hope is in the infinity of the 
world, which infinity reappears in every particle; 
the powers of all society in every individual, and of 
all mind in every mind. I know against all appear- 
ances that the universe can receive no detriment; 
that there is a remedy for every wrong and a sat- 
isfaction for every soul. Here is this wonderful 
thought. But whence came it? Who put it in 
the mind ? It was not I, it was not you ; it is 
elemental, — belongs to thought and virtue, and 
whenever we have either, we see the beams of this 
light. When the Master of the universe has points 
to carry in his government he impresses his will in 
the structure of minds. 

But proceeding to the enumeration of the few 
simple elements of the natural faith, the first fact 
that strikes us is our delight in permanence. All 
great natures are lovers of stability and perma- 
nence, as the type of the Eternal. After science 
begins, belief of permanence must follow in a 
healthy mind. Things so attractive, designs so 
wise, the secret workman so transcendently skilful 
that it tasks successive -generations of observers 
only to find out, part with part, the delicate contri- 
vance and adjustment of a weed, of a moss, to its 



IMMORTALITY. 299 

wants, growth, and perpetuation, all these adjust- 
ments becoming perfectly intelligible to our study, 
— and the contriver of it aU forever hidden ! To 
breathe, to sleep, is wonderful. But never to know 
the Cause, the Giver, and infer his character and 
will ! Of what import this vacant sky, these puff- 
ing elements, these insignificant lives full of selfish 
loves and quarrels and ennui ? Everything is pro- 
spective, and man is to live hereafter. That the 
world is for his education is the only sane solution 
of the enigma. And I think that the naturalist 
works not for himself, but for the believing mind, 
which turns his discoveries to revelations, receives 
them as private tokens of the grand good- will of 
the Creator. 

The mind delights in immense time ; delights in 
rocks, in metals, in mountain-chains, and in the 
evidence of vast geologic periods which these give ; 
in the age of trees, say of the Sequoias, a few of 
which will span the whole history of mankind ; in 
the noble toughness and imperishableness of the 
palm-tree, which thrives under abuse; delights in 
architecture, whose building lasts so long, — "a 
house," says Euskin, " is not in its prime until it is 
five hundred years old," — and here are the Pyra- 
mids, which have as many thousands, and crom- 
lechs and earth-mounds much older than these. 

We delight in stability, and really are interested 
in nothing that ends. What lasts a century pleases 



300 IMMORTALITY. 

Tis in comparison with what lasts an hour. But 
a century, when we have once made it familiar 
and compared it with a true antiquity, looks dwarf- 
ish and recent; and it does not help the matter 
adding numbers, if we. see that it has an end, which 
it will reach just as surely as the shortest. A can- 
dle a mile long or a hundred miles long does not 
help the imagination ; only ar self-feeding fire, an in- 
extinguishable lamp, like the sun and the star, that 
we have not yet found date and origin for. But 
the nebular theory threatens their duration also, 
bereaves them of this glory, and will make a shift 
to eke out a sort of eternity by succession, as plants 
and animals do. 

And what are these delights in the vast and per- 
manent and strong, but approximations and resem- 
blances of what is entire and sufficing, creative and 
self-sustaining life? For the Creator keeps his 
word with us. These long-lived or long-enduring 
objects are to us, as we see them, only symbols of 
somewhat in us far longer-lived. Our passions, our 
endeavors, have something ridiculous and mocking, 
if we come to so hasty an end. If not to he, how 
like the bells of a fool is the trump of fame ! Na- 
ture does not, like the Empress Anne of Eussia, 
call together all the architectural genius of the 
Empire to build and finish and furnish a palace of 
snow, to melt again to water in the first thaw. 
Will you, with vast cost and pains, educate your 



IMMORTALITY. 301 

children to be adepts in their several arts, and, as 
soon as they are ready to produce a naasterpiece, 
call out a file of soldiers to shoot them down ? "We 
must infer our destiny from the preparation. "We 
are driven by instinct to hive innumerable experi- 
ences, which are of no visible value, and which we 
may revolve through many lives before we shall 
assimilate or exhaust them. . Now there is nothing 
in nature capricious, or whimsical, or accidental, or 
unsupported. Nature never moves by jumps, but 
always in steady and supported advances. Tlie 
implanting of a desire indicates that the gratifica- 
tion of that desire is in the constitution of the 
creature that feels it ; the wish for food, the wish 
for motion, the wish for sleep, for society, for 
knowledge, are not random whims, but grounded 
in the structure of the creature, and meant to be 
satisfied by food, by motion, by sleep, by society, 
by knowledge. If there is the desire to live, and in 
larger sphere, with more knowledge and power, it 
is because life and knowledge and power are good 
for us, and we are the natural depositaries of these 
gifts. The love of life is out of all proportion to 
the value set on a single day, and seems to indi- 
cate, like all our other experiences, a conviction of 
immense resources and possibilities proper to us, 
on which we have never drawn. 

All the comfort I have found teaches me to con- 
fide that I shall not have less in times and places 



302 IMMOETALITY. 

that I do not yet know. I have known admirable 
persons, without feeling that they exhaust the pos- 
sibilities of virtue and talent. I have seen what 
glories of climate, of summer mornings and even- 
ings, of midnight sky, — I have enjoyed the bene- 
fits of all this complex machinery of arts and 
civilization, and its results of comfort. The good 
Power can easily provide me millions more as good. 
Shall I hold on with both hands to every paltry 
possession ? All I have seen teaclies me to trust 
the Creator for all I have not seen. Whatever it 
be which the great Providence prepares for us, it 
must be something large and generous, and in the 
great style of his works. The future must be up 
to the style of our faculties, — of memory, of hope, 
of imagination, of reason. I have a house, a closet 
which holds my books, a table, a garden, a field : are 
these, any or all, a reason for refusing the angel 
who beckons me away, — as if there were no room 
or skill elsewhere that could reproduce for me as 
my like or my enlarging wants may require ? We 
wish to live for what is great, not for what is mean. 
I do not wish to live for the sake of my warm 
house, my orchard, or my pictures. I do not wish 
to live to wear out my boots. 

As a hint of endless being, we may rank that 
novelty which perpetually attends life. The soul 
does not age with the body. On the borders of the 
grave, the wise man looks forward with equal elas- 



IMMORTALITY. 303 

ticity of mind, or hope ; and why not, after millions 
of years, on the verge of still newer existence ? — 
for it is the nature of intelligent beings to be for- 
ever new to life. Most men are insolvent, or 
promise by their countenance and conversation and 
by their early endeavor much more than they ever 
perform, — suggesting a design still to be carried 
out; the man must have new motives, new com- 
panions, new condition, and another term. Frank- 
lin said, " Life is rather a state of embryo, a prepa- 
ration for life. A man is not completely born until 
he has passed through death." Every really able 
man, in whatever direction he work, — a man of 
large affairs, an inventor, a statesman, an orator, a 
poet, a painter, — if you talk sincerely with him, 
considers his work, however much admired, as far 
short of what it should be. What is this Better, 
this flying Ideal, but the perpetual promise of his 
Creator ? 

The fable of the Wandering Jew is agreeable to 
men, because they want more time and land in 
which to execute their thoughts. But a higher 
poetic use must be made of the legend. Take us 
as we are, with our experience, and transfer us to a 
new planet, and let us digest for its inhabitants 
what we could of the wisdom of this. After we 
have found our depth there, and assimilated what 
we could of the new experience, transfer us to a new 
scene. In each transfer we shall have acquired, by 



304 IMMOETALITY. 

seeing them at a distance, a new mastery of the old 
thoughts, in which we were too much immersed. 
In short, all our intellectual action, not promises, 
but bestows a feeling of absolute existence. We 
are taken out of time and breathe a purer air. I 
know not whence we draw the assurance of pro- 
longed life, of a life which shoots that gulf we call 
death, and takes hold of what is real and abiding, 
by so many claims as from our intellectual history. 
Salt is a good preserver ; cold is : but a truth cures 
the taint of mortality better, and " preserves from 
harm until another period." A sort of absoluteness 
attends all perception of truth, — no smell of age, 
no hint of corruption. It is self-sufficing, sound, 
entire. 

Lord Bacon said : " Some of the philosophers who 
were least divine denied generally the immortality 
of the soul, yet came to this point, that whatsoever 
motions the spirit of man could act and perform 
without the organs of the body might remain after 
death, which were only those of the u.nderstand- 
ing, and not of the affections ; so immortal and 
incorruptible a thing did knowledge seem to them 
to be." And Van Helmont, the philosopher of 
Holland, drew his sufficient proof purely from the 
action of the intellect. " It is my greatest desire," 
- he said, " that it might be granted unto atheists to . 
have tasted, at least but one only moment, what it 
is intellectually to understand ; whereby they may 



IMMORTALITY. 305 

feel the immortality of the mind, as it were, by 
touching." A farmer, a laborer, a mechanic, is 
driven by his work all day, but it ends at night ; it 
has an end. But, as far as the mechanic or farmer 
is also a scholar or thinker, his work has no end. 
That which he has learned is that there, is much 
more to be learned. The wiser he is, he feels only 
the more his incompetence. "What we know is 
a point to what we do not know." A thousand 
years, — tenfold, a hundred-fold his faculties, would 
not suf&ce. The demands of his task are such that 
it becomes omnipresent. He studies in his walking, 
at his meals, in his amusements, even in his sleep. 
Montesquieu said, " The love of study is in us al- 
most the only eternal passion. All the others quit 
us in proportion as this miserable machine which 
holds them approaches its ruin." "Art is long," 
says the thinker, " and life is short." He is but as 
a fly or a worm to this mountain, this continent, 
which his thoughts inhabit. It is a perception 
that comes by the activity of the intellect ; never to 
the lazy or rust}^ mind. Courage comes naturally 
to those who have the habit of facing labor and 
danger, and who therefore know the power of their 
arms and bodies ; and courage or confidence in the 
mind comes to those who know by use its wonder- 
ful forces and inspirations and returns. Belief in 
its future is a reward kept only for those who use 
it. "To me," said Goethe, "the eternal existence 



306 IMMORTALITY. 

of my soul is proved from my idea of activity. If 
I work incessantly till my death, nature is bound to 
give me another form of existence, when the pres- 
ent can no longer sustain my spirit." 

It is a proverb of the world that good- will makes 
intelligence, that goodness itself is an eye ; and the 
one doctrine in which all religions agree, is that 
new light is added to the mind in proportion as it 
uses that which it has. " He that doeth the will 
of God abideth forever." 

Ignorant people confound reverence for the in- 
tuitions with egotism. There is no confusion in 
the things themselves. Health of mind consists in 
the perception of law. Its dignity consists in being 
under the law. Its goodness is the most generous 
extension of our private interests to the dignity and 
generosity of ideas. Nothing seems to me so excel- 
lent as a belief in the laws. It communicates no- 
bleness, and, as it were, an asylum in temples to 
the loyal soul. 

I confess that everything connected with our 
personality fails. N"ature never spares the indi- 
vidual. We are always balked of a complete suc- 
cess. No prosperity is promised to that. We have 
our indemnity only in the success of that to which 
we belong. That is immortal and we only through 
that. 

The soul stipulates for no private good. That 
which is private I see not to be good. " If truth 



IMMORTALITY. , 307 

live, I live ; if justice live, I live," said one of the 
old saints, " and these by any man's suffering are 
enlarged and enthroned." 

The moral sentiment measures itself by sacrifice. 
It risks or ruins property, health, life itself, without 
hesitation, for its thought, and all men justify the 
man by their praise for this act. And Mahomet in 
the same mind declared, " ITot dead but living ye 
are to account all those who are slain in the way 
of God." 

On these grounds I think that wherever man 
ripens, this audacious belief presently appears, — 
in the savage, savagely ; in the good, purely. As 
soon as thought is exercised, this belief is inevita- 
ble ; as soon as virtue glows, this belief confirms 
itself. It is a kind of summary or completion of 
man. It cannot rest on a legend; it cannot be 
quoted from one to another ; it mtist have the as- 
surance of a man's faculties that they can fill a 
larger theatre and a longer term than nature here 
allows him. Goethe said: " It is to a thinking be- 
ing quite impossible to think himself non-existent, 
ceasing to think and live; so far does every one 
carry in himself the proof of immortality, and quite 
spontaneously. But so soon as the man will be 
objective and go out of himself, so soon as he dog- 
matically will grasp a personal duration to bolster 
up in cockney fashion that inward assurance, he is 
lost in contradiction." The doctrine is not senti- 



308 IMMORTALITY. 

mental, but is grounded in the necessities and forces 
we possess. Nothing will hold but that which we 
must be and must do. 

*' Man's heart the Almighty to the Future set 
By secret but inviolate springs." 

The revelation that is true is written on the palms 
of the hands, the thought of our mind, the desire 
of our heart, or nowhere. My idea of heaven is 
that there is no melodrama in it at all ; that it is 
wholly real. Here is the emphasis of conscience 
and experience; this is no speculation, but the 
most practical of doctrines. Do you think that 
the eternal chain of cause and effect which per- 
vades nature, which threads the globes as beads on 
a string, leaves this out of its circuit, — leaves out 
this desire of God and men as a waif and a caprice, 
altogether cheap and common, and falling without 
reason or merit ? 

We live by desire to live ; we live by choices ; 
by will, by thought, by virtue, by the vivacity of 
the laws which we obey, and obeying share their 
lif^, — or we die by sloth, by disobedience, by los- 
ing hold of life, which ebbs out of us. But whilst 
I find the signatures, the hints and suggestions, 
noble and wholesome, — whilst I find that all the 
ways of virtuous living lead upward and not down- 
ward, — yet it is not my duty to prove to myself 
the immortality of the soul. That knowledge is 
hidden very cunningly. Perhaps the archangels 



IMMORTALITY. 309 

cannot find the secret of their existence, as the 
eye cannot see itself; but, ending or endless, to live 
whilst I live. 

There is a drawback to the value of all state- 
ments of the doctrine ; and I think that one ab- 
stains from writing or printing on the immortality 
of the soul, because, when he comes to the end of 
his statement, the hungry eyes that run through it 
will close disappointed; the listeners say, That is 
not here which we desire, — and I shall be as 
much wronged by their hasty conclusion, as they 
feel themselves wronged by my omissions. I mean 
that I am a better believer, and all serious -souls are 
better believers, in the immortality than we can give 
gTounds for. The real evidence is too subtle, or is 
higher than we can write down in propositions, and 
therefore Wordsworth's " Ode " is the best modern 
essay on the subject. 

"We cannot prove our faith by syllogisms. The 
argument refuses to form in the mind. A con- 
clusion, an inference, a grand augury, is ever hover- 
ing ; but attempt to ground it, and the reasons are 
all vanishing and inadequate. You cannot make a 
written theory or demonstration of this as you can 
an orrery of the Copernican astronomy. It must 
be sacredly treated. Speak of the mount in the 
mount. ISTot by literature or theology, but only by 
rare integrity, by a man permeated and perfumed 
with airs of heaven, — with manliest or womanliest 



310 IMMORTALITY. 

enduring love, — can the vision be clear to a use 
the most sublime. And hence the fact that in the 
minds of men the testimony of a few inspired souls 
has had such weight and penetration. You shall 
not say, " my bishop, my pastor, is there any 
resurrection ? What do you think ? Did Dr. Chan- 
ning believe that we should know each other ? did 
Wesley? did Butler? did Tenelon?" What ques- 
tions are these ! Go read Milton, Shakspeare, or 
any truly ideal poet. Eead Plato, or any seer of 
the interior realities. Eead St. Augustine, Sweden- 
borg, Immanuel Kant. Let any master simply re- 
cite to you the substantial laws of the intellect, and 
in the presence of the laws themselves you will 
never ask such primary-school questions. 

Is immortality only an intellectual quality, or, 
shall I say, only an energy, there being no passive ? 
He has it, and he alone, who gives life to all names, 
persons, things, where he comes. No religion, not 
the wildest mythology, dies for him ; no art is lost. 
He vivifies what he touches. Future state is an 
illusion for the ever-present state. It is not length 
of life, but depth of life. It is not duration, but 
a taking of the soul out of time, as all high 
action of the mind does : when we are living in the 
sentiments we ask no questions about time. The 
spiritual world takes place ; — that which is always 
the same. But see how the sentiment is wise. 
Jesus explained nothing, but the influence of him 



IMMORTALITY. 311 

took people out of time, and they felt eternal. A 
great integrity makes us immortal ; an admiration, 
a deep love, a strong will, arms us above fear. It 
makes a day memorable. We say we lived years 
in that hour. It is strange that Jesus is esteemed 
by mankind the bringer of the doctrine of im- 
mortality. He is never once weak or sentimental ; 
he is very abstemious of explanation, he never 
preaches the personal immortality ; whilst Plato ' 
and Cicero had both allowed themselves to overstep 
the stern limits of the spirit, and gratify the people 
with that picture. 

How ill agrees this majestical immortality of our 
religion with the frivolous population ! Will you 
build magnificently for mice ? Will you offer em- 
pires to such as cannot set a house or private 
affairs in order ? Here are people who cannot dis- 
pose of a day ; an hour hangs heavy on their hands ; 
and will you offer them rolling ages without end? 
But this is the way we rise. Within every man's 
thought is a higher thought, — within the character 
he exhibits to-day, a higher character. The youth 
puts off the illusions of the child, the man puts 
off the ignorance and tumultuous passions of youth ; 
proceeding thence puts off the egotism of manhood, 
and becomes at last a public and universal soul. 
He is rising to greater heights, but also rising 
to realities ; the outer relations and circumstances 
dying out, he entering deeper into God, God into 



312 IMMORTALITY. 

him, until the last garment of egotism falls, and he 
is with God, — shares the will and the immensity 
of the First Cause. 

It is curious to find the selfsame feeling, that it 
is not immortality, but eternity, — not duration, 
but a state of abandonment to the Highest, and so 
the sharing of His perfection, — appearing in the 
farthest east and west. The human mind takes no 
account of geography, language, or legends, but in 
all utters the same instinct. 

Yama, the lord of Death, promised Nachiketas, 
the son of Gautama, to grant him three boons at 
his own choice. !N'achiketas, knowing that his fa- 
ther Gautama was offended with him, said, "0 
Death ! let Gautama be appeased in mind, and for- 
get his anger against me : this I choose for the first 
boon." Yama said, '' Through my favor, Gautama 
will remember thee with loye as before." For the 
second boon, N"achiketas asks that the fire by which 
heaven is gained be made known to him; which 
also Yama allows, and says, " Choose the third boon, 
Kachiketas ! " ISTachiketas said, there is this in- 
quiry. Some say the soul exists after tlie death of 
man; others say it does not exist. This I should 
like to know, instructed by thee. Such is the third 
of the boons. Yama said, "For this question, it 
was inquired of old, even by the gods ; for it is not 
easy to understand it. Subtle is its nature. Choose 
another boon, Nachiketas I Do not compel me 



IMMORTALITY. 313 

to this." Nachiketas said, " Even by the gods was 
it inquired. And as to what thou sayest, Death, 
that it is not easy to understand it, there is no other 
speaker to be found like thee. There is no other 
boon like this." Yama said, "Choose sons and 
grandsons who may live a hundred years ; choose 
herds of cattle; choose elephants and gold and 
horses ; choose the wide expanded earth, and live 
thyself as many years as thou listeth. Or, if thou 
knowest a boon like this, choose it, together with 
wealth and far-extending life. Be a king, ISTachi- 
ketas ! On the wide earth I will make thee the 
enjoyer of all desires. All those desires that are 
difficult to gain in the world of mortals, all those 
ask thou at thy pleasure ; — those fair nymphs of 
heaven with their chariots, with their musical in- 
struments ; for the like of them are not to be gained 
by men. I will give them to thee, but do not ask 
the question, of the state of the soul after death." 
Kachiketas said, " AU those enjoyments are of yester- 
day. With thee remain thy horses and elephants, 
with thee the dance and song. If we should obtain 
wealth, we live only as long as thou pleasest. The 
boon which I choose I have said." Yama said, 
"One thing is good, another is pleasant. Blessed 
is he who takes the good, but he who chooses the 
pleasant loses the object of man. But thou, con- 
sidering the objects of desire, hast abandoned them. 
These two, ignorance (whose object is what is pleas- 



314 IMMORTALITY. 

ant) and knowledge (whose object is what is good), 
are known to be far asunder, and to lead to differ- 
ent goals. Believing this world exists, and not the 
other, the careless youth is subject to my sway. 
That knowledge for which thou hast asked is not to 
be obtained by argument. I know worldly happi- 
ness is transient, for that firm one is not to be ob- 
tained by what is not firm. The wise, by means 
of the union of the intellect with the soul, think- 
ing him whom it is hard to behold, leaves both grief 
and joy. Thee, IN'achiketas ! I believe a house 
whose door is open to Brahma. Brahma the su- 
preme, whoever knows him, obtains whatever he 
wishes. The soul is not born ; it does not die ; it 
was not produced from any one. 'Not was any pro- 
duced from it. Unborn, eternal, it is not slain, 
though the body is slain; subtler than what is 
subtle, greater than what is great, sitting it goes f [r, 
sleeping it goes everywhere. Thinking the Sv^til 
as unbodily among bodies, firm among fleeting 
things, the wise man casts off all grief. The soul 
cannot be gained by knowledge, not by understand- 
ing, not by manifold science. It can be obtained by 
the soul by which it is desired. It reveals its own 
truths." 

THE END. 



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